Fire & Ash

CHAPTER 33

Sister Sun followed the Red Brother out of the hot Nevada sun and into the cloying darkness of an old convenience store. The wire racks had long since been picked clean, and the floor was littered with animal droppings, bones, and trash. There were splashes of blood on the floor and walls, and Sister Sun imagined she could almost hear the screams of heretics who had been brought in here to be interrogated by the saint. The desert outside was filled with blind and skinless dead who wandered without purpose.

Behind the counter, Saint John sat on a stool, carefully cleaning his many knives. His fingers were long and deft, and if she watched them too closely, Sister Sun knew she could be hypnotized by them.

The saint did not look up. “How pleasant of you to join me, my sister.”

She bowed. “Honored One.”

“Mother Rose is back, did you know?”

“Yes, Honored One.”

“I am told that she visited the Shrine of the Fallen yesterday.”

“Yes.”

He glanced up finally, and there was amusement in his eyes. An almost prankish merriment.

“I am told that she was satisfied that the seals of the Shrine were intact,” he said, “exactly as she left them.”

Sister Sun nodded.

The saint glanced past her to the killers of the Red Brotherhood who stood silent and vigilant by the door. “Leave us,” he said. “No one enters until I say otherwise.”

They nodded and, quiet as ghosts, left the store.

Saint John let silence settle over things for a moment. His clever hands worked steadily with cloth and oil and a small pick to dig out even the slightest flake of drying blood from the skinning knife he held.

“You have had one month with the materials from the heretic Dr. McReady,” he said.

“Yes, Honored One.”

“Tell me.”

Sister Sun took a breath to steady her nerves. It was not fear that made her tremble. It was a terrible excitement.

“As I have said many times, Honored One,” she began, “science is like a knife. Used by a heretic, it is a thing of great evil. Used in the cause of righteousness, it is a holy weapon of great power.”

“And do you believe that you have discovered a way to turn these evil things to holy purpose?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have.”

He set down his knife. “Explain it to me.”

She did. It did not take very long. Saint John had a first-class intellect. And it was a cold mind, capable of separating rational assessment from emotions and religious passion. Sister Sun told him what she’d discovered in those notes, and how it coincided with theories she had been working on prior to kneeling to kiss the knife and join the Night Church. She explained what she’d learned from those notes, and she outlined what she did not yet know.

“You say that the notes include a formula to cure the Reaper Plague?” asked Saint John.

“A treatment,” she corrected. “But it amounts to the same thing. McReady was poised to eradicate the plague and all the gray people. But she apparently went elsewhere to complete her research.”

“Could you create a countermeasure to this ‘treatment’?” asked the saint.

Sister Sun chewed her lip, then gave a slow shake of her head. “No. Not as such,” she said. “But I could take her research and turn it to serve us.”

“How?”

Sister Sun told him.

“What would be required for you to do this?”

She said, “I need a lab. Or at least basic equipment.”

“We’re in a desert.”

She shook her head. “There’s a biological testing facility less than two hundred miles from here. I can use that. It would have a portable generator, which could be repaired and refueled. With ten reapers as assistants, I can have the lab running inside two weeks.”

He considered this, his lips pursed.

“And if you had fifty reapers as assistants — how quickly could you get it running?”

She stared at him. At his dark and glittering eyes. At his smile.

Then she smiled too.

CHAPTER 34

Benny looked for Nix the rest of the day but didn’t find her.

While he was walking back to try the mess hall again, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a blue balloon floating on the hot air. It was on the far side of the trench, though, and the zoms all raised their dead eyes to stare at it. The balloon had barely any lift and bounced from one to another of the zoms, touching the tops of heads, rebounding from clumsy fingers.

It must have escaped from Eve, he thought.

Then it occurred to him — how was it able to float at all?

Benny knew about helium from Peppertoes, the clown at the harvest fair in Mountainside. He had a big tank of helium — an item that must have cost him a fair percentage of the ration dollars he was paid by the town to perform for the kids. Every year Peppertoes would give a helium-filled balloon to the kid who grew the biggest sweet pepper. Morgie’s cousin Bethy won twice.

But who around here had a tank of helium?

He watched the balloon bounce and bounce, and then he saw a zom make a successful grab at it. The blue orb vanished into the crowd of the dead, and a second later there was a loud pop!

Benny frowned at the zoms, then scanned the sky for more balloons. There were none. And when he looked over at the playground, the children were gone. Siesta time?

Benny shrugged and forgot the balloon as he resumed his search for Nix.

Finally he asked Sister Hannahlily if she knew anything, and the nun confirmed that Nix and Lilah had been attacked by the living dead. From the disapproving look on the nun’s face, Benny knew that the attacking zoms had been quieted. The way-station monks and nuns opposed violence in all forms, especially against the “Children of Lazarus.” They considered it sinful to harm the mindless dead. She did not say as much, but her feelings were written on her pinched features.

“Is she okay?” asked Benny urgently. “Nix. And Lilah, too. Are they okay?”

The nun hesitated. “They were not physically injured.”

“But—?”

“But they were both very upset. Perhaps the weight of their actions was too much for them.”

And maybe bright blue monkeys will fly out of my butt, thought Benny, but he left it unsaid. “Where are they?”

“In the women’s dormitory,” said Sister Hannahlily.

“Can you—”

“They’ve had a hard day, young brother,” said the nun. “If you care for them, allow each of the girls adequate time to reflect on her actions, and to look inward for forgiveness from God.”

Benny tried fifteen different ways to convince Sister Hannahlily that he needed to get a message to the girls. He might as well have been trying to convince a zom to juggle and tell jokes.

“Perhaps an evening of quiet reflection and prayer would do you some good as well,” said the nun. With that she turned and headed toward the chapel tent for evening prayers.

Benny went to the women’s dormitory doorway, but the nun on guard there was a gargoyle-faced bruiser named, of all things, Sister Daisy. She listened to Benny without a flicker of expression, then told him to go away. She did not actually threaten physical harm — she was after all, a nun — but there was such palpable menace in her voice that Benny felt himself dwindle. He crept away.

He ate alone and went outside for a walk along the trench. There were so many things to consider and process. As the sun fell behind the mountains, the desert transformed from hot tan and burning red to a soft, cool purple. Benny came upon a huddled shape seated alone on the edge of the trench. He was ten feet away when he heard the sound of muffled sobs.

“Riot—?”

The figure straightened, and Riot turned a puffed and tear-streaked face toward him. She sniffed. “Hey, Benny.”

Benny came and sat down next to her. “You okay?”

She sniffed again. “ ’Bout as good as I look, I suppose.”

“Can I help?”

“Not unless y’all got a time machine or a magic wand.”

“I wish.”

They watched the sky darken from purple to bottomless black. Stars ignited one after the other, and soon the ceiling of the universe burned with a million points of light.

“Your mom…?” Benny ventured.

But Riot shook her head. “That’s part of it.”

“Eve?”

“That poor little girl,” Riot said in a tiny voice that was too fragile to hold back the tide of sobs.

“Shhh,” soothed Benny, “she’s safe now. She’ll be okay.”

“No, she won’t,” said Riot. “No… oh, Benny, I can’t stand it. She’s so lost. She’s all alone in the dark and I can’t reach her. No one can. They killed her. Damn them to hell, but they killed that sweet little girl.”

The sobs overwhelmed Riot, and the sound of her weeping came close to breaking Benny’s heart. He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her against his chest. He wanted to say something — anything — that might pull Riot back from her pain, but really… what was there to say? Her mother had been a monster and was now a zombie. Eve’s mother and father had been murdered, and Eve was so badly broken that there might not be a way to mend her.

She’s all alone in the dark and I can’t reach her.

Those words were all the uglier for being true.

Sometimes there aren’t words, Benny knew. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines. Benny had left his footprints in the dust of that place. It was on the day Tom brought him to Sunset Hollow, to the house Benny had lived in as a baby, to the place where his parents waited, year after interminable year, tied to kitchen chairs. Tom could have quieted their parents years ago, but he’d waited because he knew that one day his little brother would need to have a hand in the closure of their shared pain. That day — that terrible, terrible day — Tom had taken his knife and quieted Benny’s dad, Tom’s stepfather. Then he’d given the knife to Benny. It was an act of kindness and of respect that felt like the worst betrayal, the worst punishment.

Holding Riot, he closed his eyes and was right back at that moment with everything as clear and precise as a razor cut.

Benny stood behind the zombie, and it took six or seven tries before he could bring himself to touch her. Eventually he managed it. Tom guided him, touching the spot where the knife had to go. Benny put the tip of the knife in place.

“When you do it,” said Tom, “do it quick.”

“Can they feel pain?”

“I don’t know. But you can. I can. Do it quick.”

Benny closed his eyes. He took a ragged breath and said, “I love you, Mom.”

He did it quick.

And it was over.

He dropped the knife and Tom gathered him up and they sank down to their knees together on the kitchen floor, crying so loud that the sound threatened to break the world.

The way Riot wept now was her passport to that country. Nix had been there too. And Lilah. Each of them had wandered alone through that land, refugees among the war-torn devastation of their innocence.

Benny did not tell Riot that it was okay, because it wasn’t.

He didn’t tell her that this would pass. The moment would, but the scars would always be there. It was the thing that would always identify them as travelers through the storm lands of the soul.

CHAPTER 35

On a hot afternoon Sister Sun staggered out into the sunlight. Saint John and the army had been gone now for weeks, marching to California to find nine towns filled with heretics. By the time Sister Sun had returned from the remote lab two hundred miles away, the saint had already left. She felt empty without him; he was a great source of strength for her.

Her Red Brotherhood guardsmen snapped to attention. The nearest of them saw how unsteady she was on her feet and rushed to catch her as Sister Sun’s knees buckled.

“Sister—” he began, but she cut him off.

“No, I’m fine… I just need to sit down. Send a runner to find Brother Peter. At once. Good. And some water. Thanks….”

She sat in the shade under a Joshua tree and sipped water from an aluminum canteen. Her hands shook so badly that the water sloshed against her lips and splashed onto the front of her shirt, darkening the black cloth and soaking the angel wings.

“Brother Peter is coming up the hill,” said the reaper who’d helped her sit.

Sister Sun looked up to see the unsmiling young man walking toward her at a brisk pace, his own guards fanned out behind him.

“Are you unwell, my sister?” he called as he jogged the last few yards. Sister Sun grabbed his wrist and pulled him close.

“Send them away,” she whispered.

Peter snapped his fingers and the Red Brothers immediately retreated out of earshot but within visual range.

“What is it, sister?” asked Peter, his tone gentle and filled with concern. “Is it the cancer…?”

“No,” she said, a smile forming on her lips, “it’s not me. It’s nothing wrong.”

“Then—?”

She clutched two handfuls of his shirt with desperate excitement. “I figured it out, Peter,” she cried.

“You…”

“I know how to kill them.”

“Kill who?”

Sister Sun could feel the glorious madness blossom in her eyes. And from Peter’s reaction, she knew he could see it too.

“Everyone,” she said. “I figured out how to kill… everyone.”

CHAPTER 36

“How do you feel today?” asked the voice.

“I’ve developed an irresistible hunger for human flesh,” said Benny.

There was a long, long silence. The interview cubicle was so dark that Benny could barely see the wall-mounted speaker. He bent close to listen. He could hear the interviewer breathing.

“Hello?”

The voice said, “When you say that you’ve developed a—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, it was a joke.”

After a moment the voice said, “A ‘joke’?”

“Yes. I’m sure even you lug nuts have heard that word before.”

“Mr. Imura… why would you make a joke about something like that?”

“Why not?”

There was no answer.

Benny knocked on the speaker. “Hey — you still there?”

“How do you feel today?” asked the voice, as if the conversation was just starting.

Benny sighed. “With my hands.”

“Mr. Imura…”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing to help my friend Chong.”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“Is he getting better?”

“He’s stabilized.”

“Is he getting better?” Benny asked again, more slowly, over-enunciating each word.

“We… are not sure we can expect an improvement at this time.”

“Then let me out of here.”

“What?”

“Let me out. We’re done.”

“Mr. Imura,” said the voice, “you are being immature about this.”

“Immature?” Benny laughed. “I went out to that plane yesterday to look for those stupid research notes. I didn’t see you out there.”

“We have to stay inside the quarantine of the lab.”

“I didn’t see your soldiers out there either. In fact, you know who I did see out there? A freaking reaper. And you know what I did? I freaking killed him. That’s what I did. You want to hide behind your stupid wall inside this freaking bunker and call me immature?” Benny kicked the speaker as hard as he could. The little grille buckled. “You’re not doing anything for me or Chong or anyone else, so tell me why I should help you? Tell me what we’re accomplishing with these little chats of ours. All you’re doing is wasting my time and pissing me off.”

He gave the speaker another kick.

Almost three full minutes passed before the door opened. In that time the voice did not return, did not ask another question.

Benny got up and stepped out into the hot sunlight. A monk was there to guide him across the bridge.

No way I’m going back in there, he told himself. I’d rather be stuck in a zombie pit at Gameland with my hands tied behind my back.

Suddenly that fragment of broken memory from yesterday skittered across his mind again.

He froze.

“Brother—?” inquired the monk, but Benny held up his hand.

“Gimme a sec…”

He closed his eyes and repeated what he’d just thought. There was something there.

Zombie pit.

Yes.

Sergeant Ortega. A big soldier.

In a zombie pit?

Yes.

No. Not exactly. Not a zombie pit.

Not at Gameland. Benny was sure of that much. Sergeant Ortega.

He could see the face.

Not a living face. Dead.

Definitely zommed out.

But also definitely Sergeant Ortega. No doubt about it.

In a pit.

Zombie.

Pit.

What other pits were there with zombies in them?

And suddenly he had it.

His eyes snapped open.

He remembered exactly where he had seen Sergeant Luis Ortega. And if he was right, then the man — the zom that had been that man — would still be there.

Benny bolted from beside the monk and ran as fast as he could across the bridge.

CHAPTER 37

Benny found Nix in the mess hall. She was sitting with Riot, their heads bent together as they spoke.

“Nix!” he called from halfway across the room.

Her head jerked up and she looked around. Then she immediately got up and started to turn away, to leave. Benny ran to her and caught her wrist.

“Nix — I heard about yesterday. Are you all right?”

“Yes. We’re both okay.”

“Thank God!” he said breathlessly. “Listen, I need to talk to you.”

“Benny — no, I can’t… I…”

He gently pulled her around to face him. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying a long time, and her whole face was pink and puffy. Her scar and her freckles always grew darker when she was upset, and now they were very dark.

“Listen, Nix—”

She looked up at him with such pain in her green eyes that it stalled him. “I saw him.”

“You saw… Chong?”

“Riot and I went over yesterday. They let us see him.”

Benny half turned to see the look on Riot’s face. She hadn’t told him that last night. There were other storms raging through her life, and Benny held no grudge.

Before he could say anything, Nix flung herself into his arms and clung to him with all her strength.

“Oh, Benny… he looked so bad,” she wailed. “He looked so sick. So lost.”

Her words disintegrated into sobs that were so deep, so shattered, that it silenced the entire mess hall. Those sobs were every bit as terrible as Riot’s had been.

Benny enfolded her in his arms and held her close. Her body was furnace hot against his; her tears burned like acid. She trembled with the kind of deep grief and pain that went all the way down to the core. Benny understood that kind of anguish. He held her and kissed her hair.

The monks at the tables turned away. A few of them gave him small smiles and encouraging nods, but they said nothing and did not interfere.

Benny led Nix back to her table and they sat down together, awkwardly, still clinging to each other. Riot got up and came around behind them, wrapped her arms around them both, and laid her cheek down on the tops of their heads.

Eventually the storm passed, as all storms pass.

Nix gradually straightened and pulled away. Riot sat down on her side of the table. Everyone used the napkins to wipe their streaming noses and eyes.

“Nix, I—,” Benny began, but she touched her fingers to his chest.

“Please, Benny, let me say something first.”

“Okay.”

She dabbed at her eyes. “What I said yesterday about Chong…”

Benny nodded but said nothing.

“Please, don’t ever think—”

“No,” he cut her off. “Listen to me, Nix, you don’t need to say this, and I don’t need to hear it. We… kind of just said it all anyway.”

Riot said, “See, I was right about you, Benny. You are smarter than you look.”

It was a lame joke, but it broke the bubble of tension that had been expanding to crowd the moment.

“I’m sorry,” Nix said. “I needed to say that much. I really am.”

Benny kissed her.

Nix kissed him back.

Riot made gagging sounds. “Y’all better get a room or name the baby after me.”

Benny made a covert and very rude gesture.

Then he leaned back to catch his breath. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you a bunch of things, but first I want to hear everything about yesterday. All I really heard, Nix, was that you and Lilah got jumped by some zoms….”

Nix told him the full story. Benny’s heart sank.

“Fast zoms? Four of them?”

“Three fast ones and one that might not have been,” corrected Nix.

“Even so,” said Riot, “that’s crooked math. Y’all were lucky to walk out of there with skin still on your bones.”

“Tell me about it,” Nix said, rolling her eyes.

“What was that bit with the red powder?” asked Benny.

“I don’t know,” Nix admitted. “I showed Joe and he kind of freaked. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Wonder what it is,” said Riot.

“Listen,” Benny said, changing the subject. “I had a crazy day too. I need to tell you guys, and then I need your help with something. I’d ask Joe, but nobody knows where he is and we’re running out of time. So… I need both of you to help me do something incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid.”

“Dangerous and stupid?” asked Nix, and her pretty face wore its first smile in over a day. “Sounds like one of your plans.”

“I’m on the hook already,” said Riot. “I haven’t done anything dangerous or stupid in weeks. I’m about due.”

He explained everything that had happened yesterday. The story of the fight with the reaper wiped the smiles away. The account of the Teambook raised their eyebrows. The tally of the reaper forces stole the color from their faces. But the thing that filled their eyes with fear was when Benny explained where he had seen Sergeant Ortega.

“You want us to go where?” demanded Riot. “You’re touched in the head, boy.”

“You’re absolutely out of your mind,” said Nix. “I mean seriously, Benny, you’re deranged.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But are you in?”

Nix and Riot stared at him and then at each other, and then at him again.

“We’re in,” said Nix.

CHAPTER 38

Captain Strunk sat on an overturned bucket, resting heavily with his forearms on his knees. The trade wagon stood ten feet away. On the ground, covered with pieces of canvas, lay four bodies. Fifty feet away, just inside the fence line, lay three more. All of them had been quieted.

Two figures stood in front of him. A short man and a tall boy.

The man was Deputy Gorman, Strunk’s second in command.

The boy was Morgie Mitchell.

On the ground between Morgie and Captain Strunk was a length of wood. A bokken. Smeared with blood, broken in two.

“I checked him, Cap,” said Gorman. “No bites, no scratches.”

Strunk nodded.

“I told you that I wasn’t hurt,” said Morgie. “You could have taken my word for it.”

“You fought four zoms with a stick, kid,” said Strunk. “I wouldn’t take anyone’s word that they did that without a scratch.”

Morgie said nothing.

“Tom taught you all those moves?”

Morgie nodded.

“You ever fight a zom before?”

“No.”

“You ever fight anyone before?”

Morgie shrugged. “Nothing serious.”

In his mind, though, he remembered his last act of violence. No one had been physically hurt, but it had been a terrible moment. Shoving Benny and knocking him down, right there in Morgie’s yard. The day Benny left town. The day Morgie had killed his friendship with Benny. And Nix. Chong, too. The day he lost all his friends.

Nothing serious. Except that it ended everything.

Strunk said, “The tower guard tells me you kept your head when those zoms came rushing out of that wagon.”

Morgie shrugged.

“He says that after you took down the zoms from the wagon, you went out to help Tully and Hooper.”

“I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got out there they were already dead.”

“ ‘Wasn’t fast enough,’ ” echoed Gorman. “Jeez.”

“The tower guard says that you quieted Tully and got Hooper inside the gate while he was still alive.”

“I didn’t quiet him, though,” said Morgie. “The other guards—”

“I know,” interrupted Strunk. “I’m not criticizing you. Just laying out the facts.”

Morgie said nothing.

“Your supervisor tells me that you only took the fence job because you were too young for the town watch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How young?”

“I’ll be sixteen in eight months.”

Strunk glanced at Gorman, who smiled faintly and shook his head.

A shadow fell across Morgie, and he turned to see someone standing just behind him, a person he had only ever seen on the painted fronts of Zombie Cards. The man wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built, with a shaved head and a gray goatee. He had dark-brown skin and he wore a red Freedom Riders sash across his chest. He wore a pair of matched machetes in low-slung scabbards that hung from crossed leather belts.

Morgie’s mouth went absolutely dry.

The man nodded to Strunk. “This is the boy, Cap?”

“This is him. Morgan Mitchell.”

The newcomer studied Morgie. “You trained with Tom.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgie said.

“You friends with Tom’s brother? You one of Benny’s friends?”

The question was worse than a knife in Morgie’s guts. It took him a long time before he trusted his voice enough to answer the man.

“Benny was my best friend.” His voice almost—almost—broke. “I wish I’d gone with him and Tom.”

The man nodded. “From what I heard just now, Morgie, Tom would be proud of you. Benny, too.”

Morgie turned away to hide his eyes.

The man put his hand on Morgie’s shoulder. “I don’t think you have a future in the town watch.”

Morgie snapped his head around and stared in hurt and horror at the man. But he was smiling. So were Strunk and Gorman.

“I think you need to come and train with me,” said the man.

“W-what…?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, sir. You’re Solomon Jones.”

“I’m building something important. Something Tom would approve of,” said Solomon. “And I’m looking for some real warriors.”

Morgie stared at him.

Solomon held out a muscular hand.

“Want to join me?”

CHAPTER 39

There was one thing they had to do first, and it was Nix who said it. They stood in the shade behind the mess hall.

“We have to tell Lilah,” Nix said, and Benny winced.

“Good luck with that,” murmured Riot.

Any conversation with Lilah was difficult. The Lost Girl had spent many years living alone and wild in the Ruin, killing zoms and preying on the bounty hunters working for Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. During those long years she had had no personal contact at all. No conversations, no interactions. Not even a hug, a handshake, or a kind word; and in that social vacuum she’d grown strange. Even now, after months of living with the Chong family in Mountainside, training with Tom, and traveling with Nix, Benny, and Chong on their search for the jet, Lilah was still strange. It was impossible to predict exactly how she would react to anything, though any bet laid a little heavier on the possibility of a violent reaction had a better chance of a return. For a while she’d started coming out of her shell when, against all logic and probability, she and Chong had fallen in love — but with Chong’s injury and infection, Lilah had gotten stranger still. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was brief and terse. Benny doubted that he’d exchanged as many as two hundred words with Lilah in the last three weeks.

“She won’t want to leave here,” said Nix. “I think she believes that the only reason they haven’t quieted Chong is because they’re afraid of how she’ll react.”

“That ain’t altogether a stupid fear,” said Riot. “When grown men with guns are afraid of a girl with a spear, then there’s something to take a close look at.”

Benny nodded, though he had a separate concern about Lilah. He was afraid of what she would do to herself if Chong died. Lilah was emotionally damaged and was caught in a prolonged anger phase of the grief process. Her little sister had been killed, her guardian had been murdered, Tom had been murdered, and now Chong lingered in a twilight between life and death. Benny didn’t know how much more life could push Lilah before she snapped. He’d said as much to Nix, and when he glanced at her, he could see it in her eyes. Neither of them said it aloud — Riot was a friend, but she wasn’t yet part of their family.

“I’ll tell her,” said Nix.

Benny shook his head. “If she gets even a whiff of—”

“Of what? Of me saying that Chong should be quieted? That was before, Benny. I said that before I went down and looked at him.”

“I’m just saying…”

“I got your back, Red,” said Riot. “Question is… where is she? She’s usually walking the trench line, but I don’t—”

There was a soft sound above them, and they suddenly turned and looked up to see Lilah perched like a hunting hawk on the raised corrugated metal shutter over the mess hall window. She peered down at them from between her bent knees, and only the tip of her spear rose above the shadows into the sunlight. Lilah’s eyes looked as black and bottomless as those of a skull.

“Lilah…,” gasped Nix.

Benny instinctively shifted to stand between Nix and Lilah.

“Listen, Lilah, I can explain.”

The Lost Girl hopped forward and straightened her lithe body as she dropped to the ground. It was a ten-foot drop, but she landed easily, though there was a twitch of a grimace on her tight mouth — the only concession to the wound she’d suffered less than a month ago. She’d badly gashed her cheek and jaw while escaping from a white rhinoceros and a field of crippled zoms. Injury or not, the expression in her eyes was fierce. Deadly.

“God,” breathed Nix. Riot pulled her slingshot. Benny’s hand darted toward the handle of his sword.

Lilah walked forward a few paces, ignoring Riot. She got to within inches of Benny.

“Move,” she said.

“Lilah,” Benny said, holding his ground, “you don’t understand—”

But it was Nix who moved. She stepped out from behind Benny, pushing him gently out of the way. She was much shorter than Lilah and more than a year younger. Her weapons were holstered and sheathed, and her hands were empty.

“What did you hear?” she asked.

“Everything.” Without the shadows to mask her face, Lilah’s eyes were the color of molten honey. Hot, but without any trace of sweetness. “You wanted to quiet Chong.”

Nix took a breath. Benny could see that her hands were shaking.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is that why you went to see him?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because he’s my friend. Because I love him. Because I wanted to see for myself.”

Lilah drew a slender knife from a thigh sheath. “This is Chong’s knife.”

“I know.”

“They won’t let me see him,” said Lilah.

“I know.”

“I can see him. I can get in there. You know that?”

“Yes.”

Benny and Riot nodded too. None of them doubted that Lilah could find a way into that building. People might die in the process, but she could get in.

“No one quiets Chong but me.” Lilah’s voice was a deadly whisper. “You understand?”

“Yes,” said Nix, her voice small.

Lilah looked at the others. “You all understand? No one but me?”

Benny nodded. So did Riot.

Lilah raised the knife so that sunlight glanced from it and painted Nix’s face in bright light.

“You tell me,” said Lilah, “do I need to use this today? Is Chong lost? Is he gone?”

Nix slowly shook her head.

“Say it,” growled Lilah. “Do I need to kill my town boy?”

“No,” said Nix. “God… no.”

Lilah’s eyes roved over her face for a long time. Then she slipped the knife back into its leather sheath. Then she nodded. A single nod, small and curt.

“If he has to die… you tell me.”

Nix was unable to speak, so she gave her own single nod.

Lilah looked at Benny. “You too. Tell me if I have to go in there.”

“I will,” said Benny. “But… maybe we don’t have to.”

And he told her about his plan.

She was in too.

CHAPTER 40

Once upon a time the woman had been a scientist, part of the Relativistic Astrophysics Group at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. Now she spent day after day blowing up balloons.

This was her ninth straight day of it, and the strain of taking in huge breaths and forcing the air into the balloons was really getting to her. She was light-headed all the time now, and planets and galaxies seemed to swirl around her head.

She sat in the shadowy mouth of a cave. At least they gave her plenty of water and a stool. And runners came to her three times a day to bring food for her and the two other people working with her, a former Los Angeles Realtor and an actor who had won two Emmys for a show that was on HBO before the dead rose and ate his audience. The Realtor blew up balloons too. His face was red from effort, his eyes dark with disillusionment.

Like the woman, the other two were useless people. Neither of them could fight. They were lousy hunters. Their survival had been the result of no qualities they possessed. Each of them had been helped through the apocalypse. All three of them were refugees. The scientist even believed — deep down in the secret place in her heart — that none of them knelt to kiss the knife because they believed in anything but a sure way to live through the moment. None of them had ever killed anyone. At least the scientist knew she had not. After testing her in combat training, the reaper-trainer had dismissed her in disgust and assigned her to the “support legion.”

That was a kind label for the growing mass of reapers who had no useful skills beyond cooking, sanitation, scavenging, and, apparently, blowing up balloons.

She finished the balloon and handed it off to the actor, who perched on a taller stool beside a rusted metal tank. He took a hose, fitted the mouth of the balloon around it, and squeezed a plastic trigger. There was a tiny burst of sound — the sharp hiss of gas under pressure — and the balloon lifted a bit. There was not enough helium in it to make it float; merely enough to let it bounce as if weightless. He tied it off, half turned on his stool, and gave the balloon a light tap, which sent it bouncing deeper into the cave where it bumped up against the thousands of others.

When the scientist reached for another balloon, her stubby fingernails scraped the bare bottom of the box that was positioned beside her.

“I’m out,” she said.

Another reaper, a child with a burn-withered leg and melted face, stood up from the shadows at the far side of the cave mouth. She pulled a black plastic trash bag with her and held it open for the scientist, who reached in and took a handful of small plastic bags. Fifty colored balloons in each bag. The scientist and the burned girl worked together to tear open the bags and dump the contents into the box. When it was filled, the girl limped back to her spot.

The scientist took a long drink of water and squinted out at the sun-bleached landscape. Such a terrible place. From where she sat, hidden in the shadows, she could see the tall metal spires of the siren towers of Sanctuary.

She picked up another balloon, stretched it, took a deep breath, and blew her air into the bright red rubber.

CHAPTER 41

The monk guarding the quads saw the four of them coming and immediately began shaking his head as he walked to meet them.

“Captain Ledger left express orders that no one is to take a quad without his permission.”

Benny glanced at Nix. “Do you see Captain Ledger anywhere?”

“No.”

“You see him, Riot?”

“I don’t see hide nor hair of that big ol’ boy anywhere.”

“Lilah?”

Her answer was a sour grunt.

“The captain was very specific about it,” insisted the monk. “He mentioned Brother Benjamin in particular. Under no circumstances were you to take a quad.”

Benny patted the monk on the arm. “I believe you’ll find that was more of a suggestion than a rule.”

The monk sputtered at them, but there was nothing he could do. Nix gave him a smile as bright as all the flowers in the world. Riot winked at him. They unslung their gear and began looking through the compartments of their quads. They had food, carpet coats, their entire remaining supply of cadaverine, every weapon they possessed, and a first-aid kit. Benny wore his sword slung over his shoulder the same way Tom used to wear it. Nix had Dojigiri, the Monster Cutter — the ancient sword given her by Joe — in her belt, and Tom’s old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver snugged into a shoulder holster. Riot wore her bandoliers of firecrackers, a Raven Arms .25 automatic in a belt holster, various knives, and her favorite weapon — a sturdy pre — First Night slingshot and a full pouch of sharp stones and metal ball bearings. Lilah had weapons everywhere, including a nine-millimeter pistol. They each wore vests with many small pockets crammed with other survival gear.

The monk gave up trying to physically stand between them and the bikes and began fretting over them. He double-checked their food and water and admonished them about using violence against any of God’s creatures, living or dead.

Nix slid into the saddle of her quad, a fiery red Kawasaki. “Brother,” she said, “we don’t ever want to hurt anyone. We’re actually trying to save lives.”

The monk studied her. “Seriously?”

Riot held up a hand. “Swear to God.”

That put a puzzled look on the monk’s face, and it was still there when they fired up their quads and drove away.

They passed through the chain-link gate, and Riot took the lead. Even though Benny, Nix, and Lilah knew the way, Riot was the expert; she knew every inch of this country. As soon as they cleared the twisted maze that was the hidden path leading from the open desert to Sanctuary, Riot raised her hand over her head and swung it in a circle. They immediately revved their engines, and the four of them burned their way back toward the dying forest.

They drove fast, and except for the roar of their engines, they traveled in silence. Benny kept reviewing everything that had happened since yesterday morning: Chong, the strange interviews with the scientists, the fight with Nix, the ugly truth about the missing D-series files, the fight with the reaper who used to be a soldier, the discovery of the Teambook, the conversation with Joe, and the realization that he knew where Sergeant Ortega might be. No… where Sergeant Ortega was.

They paused once on a rocky hill overlooking a big swath of the forest. The plateau with the crashed transport plane was off to the east. The densest part of the forest was north and west of them. A thin man-made stream that was part of the golf course’s original landscape design cut through the terrain, and from this distance they could catch glimpses of it as a blue ribbon winding haphazardly through the trees. Farther west was a big field that had once been a fairway. A ruptured irrigation pipe had carved a channel through the field, undercutting the foliage to create a long, crooked ravine that was surprisingly deep. The ravine was in a natural depression in the landscape, so Benny figured that what little rain runoff there was had helped to cut the channel through the loose and sandy soil.

Benny pointed.

“There,” he said, though they all knew it. It was the place where Benny and Nix had first met Riot. That first meeting had been strange. Riot had used the sharp bangs from her firecrackers to scare off a pride of hungry lions that had trapped Benny and the others. The rescue hadn’t been a kindness — Riot’s true goal had been to save Eve, who Benny had found in that very ravine. Eve was part of the group of refugees fleeing a reaper massacre; Riot was taking them to Sanctuary when Eve went missing. Oddly, it was an attack by reapers that had allowed Benny and Nix to escape Riot and her companions. That had been another very strange day.

Nix took her binoculars out of their holder and surveyed the landscape, shook her head, and handed them to Lilah.

“See anything?” asked Benny.

“No,” said Lilah.

Benny wasn’t much relieved. Zoms were surprisingly hard to spot in a landscape like this. Unless they were actively pursuing prey, they tended to stand still. Absolutely still, with none of the small, reflexive, or habitual gestures all humans make after a while.

Riot took a long pull on her canteen, then cocked an eye at Benny. “Are y’all sure about this?”

“Pretty much.”

Riot grinned. “ ‘Pretty much’ ain’t as comforting as y’all might think.”

“It’s what I have,” confessed Benny.

“Fair enough.”

“Stop talking,” said Lilah. She gunned her engine, crested the rise, and went roaring down the slope.

“Fair enough,” Riot said again. She winked at Benny and plunged after Lilah.

Benny cast a meaningful look at Nix.

“He’ll be there,” said Nix, but her words were pitched in exactly the tone people use when they’re trying to help you brace for a disappointment. She aimed her quad toward the ravine.

The voice inside Benny’s head said, On the plus side, if this works, people might stop thinking you’re a half-wit.

“Oh… shut up.”

Benny gave the Honda some gas and raced downhill to catch up.

CHAPTER 42

They parked their quads at the far side of the field, turned off the engines, dismounted, and then ran quickly and lightly through the shadows under the trees. They found a good spot several hundred yards away from the edge of the clearing, and there they stopped to observe the place where they’d parked. Lilah touched a finger to her lips, but they were all cautious enough to make no sound. Benny remembered one of Tom’s lessons about stealth and observation. When in doubt, observe, listen, wait, and evaluate.

The roar of their quads had been an unavoidable noise, which meant that they had announced their arrival to everyone and everything. The spot where they’d parked the quads was in deep shadow, though. It was impossible to tell from any distance where the riders of those vehicles were. If there were predators out here — zoms, reapers, the pride of lions, or anything else — then they would be observing that spot, waiting for movement.

Riot gestured to the others to indicate that she was going to go deeper into the woods and circle around to check the vicinity. Lilah nodded and took off in yet a different direction, leaving Nix and Benny where they were. With the two best hunters abroad in the woods, they’d be able to establish a very good idea of how safe they were.

Long minutes passed, and gradually the natural sounds of the forest returned. There were plenty of birds in this part of the forest, and some chattering monkeys. Insects buzzed through the air. A deer stepped tentatively out from under the trees on the far side of the field and began grazing among the juniper bushes. After ten minutes, Lilah walked out of the woods near where the quads were parked. Her pistol was holstered, and she held her spear loosely in her hands. Seconds later, Riot came trotting out from between a rock and a big bristlecone tree. She waved all clear.

“Let’s go,” said Benny, and he and Nix left the shadows and walked out into the sunlight. The field was covered in tall, dry grass that sighed with every breath of wind.

They walked through the tall grass and approached the edge of the ravine with caution, testing the ground with their feet in case it was undercut. A month ago Benny had stood on the edge of this ravine and thought he was safe from a group of pursuing zoms, but the edge had collapsed under him, tumbling him down to the bottom along with dozens of the dead.

They found one very solid spot and stood shoulder to shoulder looking down.

A sea of white faces looked back up at them.

Zoms.

“God,” said Benny, “they’re still here.”

Riot looked at him. “I thought that’s exactly what you expected.”

“Sure,” he admitted, “but think about it. These zoms are going to be down there forever. Just standing there. Year after year.”

“That’s horrible,” said Nix.

“That’s hell as far as I see it,” said Riot.

“That’s the Ruin,” said Lilah coldly.

They all glanced at her, then they looked down again. The faces of the dead were as pale as worms, their skin streaked with dirt, their eyes dusty, their hands reaching upward.

“How many you reckon are down there?” asked Riot.

“More than before,” said Nix. “A lot more. After the first bunch fell in while chasing Benny, others must have been drawn to the sounds.”

Lilah walked along the edge of the trench. Benny marveled that she could walk without a limp. It was only a few weeks after her injury, and every step had to hurt. The fact that she did not limp at all meant that she was eating her pain with each step. That was nearly as impressive as it was creepy.

We all eat our pain, observed his inner voice. All four of us, and Chong, and Joe and everyone else. Eating our pain gives us the fuel to keep fighting.

For once Benny could find no fault with what that inner voice said. He nodded to himself.

“I’ll take the other side,” he said. “Nix, Riot… you guys go down to the other end and start up from there.” He gave them as good a description of Ortega as he could remember.

Riot started to go, but Nix lingered a moment.

“What?” asked Benny.

She stepped closer and kept her voice low enough so that only he could hear her.

“Benny, yesterday was a mess.”

He shrugged.

“No,” she insisted, “it was. I freaked out about Chong, and I reacted the wrong way.”

“It’s—”

“I know we already talked about it, and I know we’re supposed to be over it,” she said. “But I’m not over it. I don’t know who that was yesterday, but that wasn’t me.”

“Yeah,” he said with a gentle smile, “I get that.”

“Do you?”

“I really do.”

Nix touched Benny’s cheek, but the action was tentative, almost fearful. “Can — can I ask you one question, Benny?”

“You can ask me anything.”

She took a breath and seemed to be steeling herself for what she was about to say. “Do you… do you still love me?”

He almost laughed.

Luckily, his inner voice and whatever common sense he possessed grappled with his automatic reaction and wrestled it to the floor. So instead of a laugh, he gave her a smile. Even so, Nix’s face instantly clouded.

“I’m serious,” she said sharply.

Benny nodded. “I know.”

He kissed her.

“That’s the silliest question I’ve ever been asked.”

Her frown deepened. “It’s not silly.”

“It is to me. Of course I still love you. I’m always going to love you,” he said.

Nix looked at him, troubled and puzzled. “Why?”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Why on earth do you still love me? Why on earth do you want to?”

“I—”

“I’m vicious and moody and nasty, I’m cold to you too much of the time, and sometimes I bite your head off when you’re just trying to be nice. I’m a monster.”

“Yeah, and I’m always a yummy box of chocolates. C’mon, Nix, how shallow do you think I am?”

Before she could answer, Benny turned away and began walking along the ravine, peering down through shadows at the pale faces below. He could feel Nix’s eyes on him, and he thought he could imagine at least some of what was going on in her head. Some. However, he wondered if she was trying to guess what was going on in his head. Benny remembered something Captain Strunk of the town watch once said on a hot summer afternoon on the porch of Lafferty’s General Store. Benny, Chong, and Morgie were sitting on the porch steps, opening packs of Zombie Cards; Captain Strunk was sitting in an old kitchen chair, and a bunch of other town men were with him. Mayor Kirsch; Wriggly Sputters, the town’s mailman; big one-armed Leroy Williams; Morgie Mitchell’s dad; and four or five others. The men had been talking about relationships, before and after First Night. When one of the men had, in exasperation, pronounced that all women were crazy and that all men were crazier for falling in love with them, everyone laughed. They agreed that there was just no understanding the mysteries of love. No sir, no how. Chong, who was twelve at the time, said, “What’s not to understand? People fall in love.”

The men goggled at him for a few moments, and Captain Strunk said, in a dry, amused voice, “Kid, if it turns out that you well and truly understand love, I will personally nominate you for King of the World, and I can guarantee that every man here will vote for you.”

Everyone burst out laughing. Chong had turned as red as a radish.

As he walked, Benny could almost hear the echoes of that laughter. He’d been confused by the exchange back then, but he wasn’t anymore.

Three minutes later Lilah called, “Here!”

They came running to where she stood on the edge of the ravine, using her spear to point down into the darkness. A zom, taller than the others, big-armed and big-chested, stood in a middle of a pack. They could see only his shoulders and head, but it was enough to recognize the pattern of the camouflage of the American Nation. And to see a strap across his chest — a strap Benny vaguely remembered was attached to a satchel. He had taken only peripheral note of it before, ascribing no more importance to it than to the man’s shoes or belt or other items. At the time his entire focus had been on fighting this man. He’d tried a big lateral sword slash of the kind he’d seen Tom use to cut through the legs of a zom. Only the angle of Benny’s cut had been bad, and the blade had stuck fast in the zom’s heavy thigh bone. The sword handle had been torn from Benny’s hands, and the blade might have been lost had Lilah not somehow managed to recover it. Until today, Benny had assumed she’d quieted the zom in order to take back the sword, but that wasn’t so. The zom looked as powerful and deadly as ever.

Benny crouched on the lip of the ravine. “Hello, Sergeant Ortega,” he said.

CHAPTER 43

“How do we get him out of there?” asked Nix.

“Good question, Red,” murmured Riot. “There’s more dead down there than wood ticks on a coon.”

“How many do you figure?” asked Benny.

“Rough guess,” said Riot, squinting into the gloom, “near on about—”

“It’s 261,” said Lilah.

“Oh, crap.” Benny sighed. “On the bright side, that’s only sixty-five each.”

No one laughed at the joke. Not even Benny.

Riot fingered the silver dog whistle she wore around her throat. Each of them had one. “I had a crazy idea about two of us calling the gray people from different ends of the ravine, to thin the herd, but that plain won’t work. Too darn many of ’em.”

“So what’s plan B?” asked Nix. “Do we go down at one end and try some kind of systematic quieting thing? I mean, the ravine’s narrow enough that only three or four of them could come at us at a time.”

“Stupid,” said Lilah dismissively.

Nix colored. “I know, I was thinking out loud.”

Lilah eyed her. “Don’t. Unless you have a smart plan.”

“Thank you, queen of tact,” said Benny under his breath.

They began hashing out an idea that involved using the quads to pull big branches, small fallen trees, and other bulky debris, then pushing that stuff down on either side of Sergeant Ortega. Push enough stuff down and they could create temporary walls that would lock in Ortega — and probably a few other zoms standing close to him. The end result would be a much smaller number of zoms they’d have to deal with in order to gain access to Sergeant Ortega’s pockets and that satchel.

Then they began picking holes in the plan.

“The more we use the quads, the more chance other zoms will hear us,” said Nix.

“Reapers, too,” added Riot. “It ain’t all that far from where Benny got jumped yesterday.”

“Besides,” said Benny, pointing down into the ravine, “if we block off the tunnel, that’ll still leave Ortega and a bunch of zoms in a tight little space. If one person went down, the zoms would have a feast. If all four of us went down, we’d be so crowded we’d get in each other’s way. And we can’t shoot the zoms because of the noise.”

“We can come back tomorrow with Chong’s bow and arrows,” suggested Nix.

“No,” said Lilah. “Too much time. I can lean down with my spear, try and stab them in the head…”

“And probably fall in,” said Riot. “Ground’s too iffy, and you wouldn’t have squat for leverage.”

They stood there and stared.

Benny sucked thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek. An idea occurred to him, and he looked at the coil of rope looped slantways across Lilah’s body. “Huh,” he grunted softly.

“What?” asked Nix.

“Riot — you said something a couple of minutes ago,” he said slowly. “About herding the zoms?”

“Sure, but the whistles won’t do the trick,” she said.

“No, but I read enough Western novels to know a little bit about how cowboys herded strays.” He removed the coil of rope. “Anyone here know how to throw a lasso?”

As it turned out, they all did.

Nix knew a little bit about it from the Scouts back in Mountainside. Lilah had handled rope while struggling to survive — lassoing trees to climb and roping wounded animals she was hunting. But Riot was the real expert.

“After I skedaddled from the Night Church,” she said as she began fashioning a lariat, “I fell in with a group of scavengers. Called themselves the Rat Pack. They were a crazy bunch of kids who raided towns and tagged buildings that had good supplies. The kids were all into extreme sports — or I guess what had been extreme sports before the Fall. Skateboarders, BMX bikers, in-line skaters, and free runners.”

“What’s that?” asked Nix.

“It’s a kind of sport where you do all sorts of acrobatics over obstacles and up walls and suchlike. Looks like a bunch of crazy monkeys, but it’s amazing. Fun, too.”

“You did that?”

She shrugged. “I learned me a few tricks. There was a boy named Jolt who taught me a lot of things.”

A dreamy and distant look floated through Riot’s eyes, and Benny glanced at Nix, who clearly saw it too.

“Was Jolt your boyfriend?” Nix asked carefully.

“We had a little thing going,” Riot said coyly, but didn’t elaborate.

“What happened to him?” asked Benny, though he was afraid of what the answer would be.

“I don’t rightly know. ’Bout a year ago, while I was running some people out to Sanctuary, the Rat Pack’s camp was overrun by reapers. I got there maybe two days after it happened and found half the people I knew slaughtered and the rest gone. They lit out in every possible direction, and from the tracks it looked like there were reapers in hot pursuit of every single person.” She sighed heavily. “I quieted the dead. Near on twenty of them. Some little ones, too. Only a few reapers, though. The scavengers ain’t much into killing, even in self-defense.”

“Stupid,” said Lilah, and Riot shot her a hard look.

“You’re welcome to keep your opinions to your damn self, missy,” snapped Riot, throwing down the rope and getting nose to nose with Lilah. “That Rat Pack was the closest thing I had to a real family, and I won’t hear a word against them.”

Lilah looked genuinely surprised by Riot’s reaction.

“But they let themselves die,” insisted Lilah.

“So do the way-station monks,” interjected Nix. “Not everyone believes in killing.”

Lilah pushed Riot back, but not with anger. Just to create distance. “You were with them? A scavenger?”

“Yes,” said Riot.

“And you kill.”

Riot looked down at the ground. After a moment, she sighed and picked up the rope.

“Jolt and the others? They were better than me. All they wanted to do was find food and supplies, and have some fun while the rest of the clock ticked down.” She glanced again at Lilah. “You want to tell me that’s wrong?”

This time Lilah held her tongue. She looked confused, unable to frame a reply.

Benny said, “Did you look for Jolt?”

“Oh yeah,” said Riot. “I looked all over this desert for him. Haven’t found so much as a footprint.”

“Well,” said Benny, “when this is over, when things settle down… maybe we can help you look.”

Riot smiled and shook her head. “Don’t you know nothing, boy? This ain’t never going to be over.”

She looked at the rope she held in her hands. Then, without another word, she finished tying the loose knot.

Below them, the big soldier stood in a throng of maybe a dozen smaller zoms: some women, a few teenagers, and two men of average height. Ortega looked to be about six-four or — five.

“They’re pretty thick down there,” said Riot. “Best place to lasso someone is around the chest, ’bout midway down the upper arm. But our boy’s reaching up. Might have to hook an arm and try to drag him out that way.”

Riot crept as close to the edge as she dared. The undercut ground creaked a little even under her negligible weight. Benny picked up the rope and stood behind her to anchor her in place.

“Do it!” he said.

Riot swung the lasso over her head a few times and then hurled it down.

She snagged three different arms, two of which belonged to other dead.

She eased the slack and tried again.

And again.

And again.

After eight tries she was cursing a blue streak and using language so intensely and descriptively foul that Benny was extremely impressed.

Finally Riot stepped back from the ravine and threw the lasso onto the grass.

“So much for your brilliant plan,” she groused. “I might as well hang myself with that damn thing.”

She started to stomp off, got about ten paces, and stopped. She turned with a quizzical look on her face. The same expression was blossoming on Lilah’s and Nix’s faces; and Benny was sure he wore an identical look.

Riot had said it.

Hang myself.

They looked at the lasso. Everyone smiled.

Ten seconds later they were kneeling together at the edge of the ravine, dangling a much smaller loop down into the shadows.

“A little to the left,” suggested Benny. “No, too much. Back… back…”

Lilah crouched next to Riot, her spear extended all the way down, using the blade to bat aside reaching hands and to tap the loop toward Ortega.

“Little more…,” breathed Benny. “Little more…”

The edge of the loop brushed against the big zom’s face. Everyone held their breath as, with infinite care, Riot eased it over the crown of the man’s head and then slowly, slowly down until it hung pendulously below his chin.

“Now!” cried Nix, and Riot jerked back on the rope. The slack loop snapped tight, constricting like a noose around Sergeant Ortega’s throat.

They had him.

Kind of.

He was still down in the pit.

They grabbed the rope and began to pull.

Benny, though slim, was the heaviest of them; but, like the girls, the hardships of warfare, frequent injuries, small meals, and stress had leaned him down.

Sergeant Ortega, before death and desiccation had wasted him, probably weighed 260 pounds. Now he was probably 220. They had a two-to-one weight advantage over him, but they were lifting from the top, with the majority of his weight below the noose, and they were trying to pull him up a twenty-foot wall. While he fought and writhed and struggled.

It went from a brilliant plan to a brutal struggle. The sun hammered down on them and sweat burst from their pores as they pulled. They set their feet into the sandy soil, using tufts of the tall grass for traction. They groaned and growled and yelled and cursed.

The sergeant was an improbably heavy weight. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. They moved another foot back.

And that was as far as they got.

Benny strained and strained until his blood sang in his ears and black poppies seemed to burst in his eyes.

Finally they collapsed. Their hands ached; their lungs burned with oxygen starvation. They lay sprawled where they’d fallen, except for Nix, who crawled like a battlefield victim to the edge of the ravine and peered down.

Nix, who was never one for cursing, repeated a few of the phrases Riot had used a few minutes ago.

“What?” asked Benny listlessly.

“It’s the other zoms,” she said.

Benny lifted his head. “What?”

“They grabbed at Ortega as soon as we started pulling him up. Some of them are still holding on to him.”

Benny let his head drop back with a thump. He felt Nix crawl up beside him and collapse. They lay there, defeated.

Finally, Lilah gasped out a single word. A statement and a question.

“Quad?”

Benny thought it was Riot who started laughing first. He had his eyes closed and couldn’t tell. First her, then Lilah’s creaking ghost of a laugh, then Nix. Then him. They burst out laughing as they lay on the withered brown grass.

CHAPTER 44

When they could walk, they fetched Benny’s quad, tied the end of the rope onto the back of the Honda, gunned the engine, and pulled Sergeant Ortega out of the ravine as easy as pulling a carrot out of soft soil. Four other zoms came up with him. Lilah and Riot were waiting for them, and blades flashed in the sunlight. Withered hands clutched at the big sergeant, but they were no longer attached to anything.

As Benny dragged Sergeant Ortega away from the ravine, Nix trotted beside the zom, her Monster Cutter sword raised to deliver a quieting blow.

But she didn’t have to.

The soldier lay still and silent on the grass.

Benny killed the engine and ran back to stand beside Nix. Riot and Lilah trotted up. The sergeant lay in a loose-jointed tangle of arms and legs. His face was placid in that slack rest of final death. At a glance, he looked like any other zom. Less comprehensively withered than the people who’d died on First Night, but still leathery from the Nevada sun. The only thing that was noticeably wrong with him was his neck.

It was too long.

Inches too long.

Between the pull of the quad and the drag of the other zoms clinging to him, the bones of the dead man’s neck had separated, and the spinal cord had stretched too far and snapped. Had the strain been a little heavier, or the process of pulling him up taken a few seconds longer, the envelope of skin and muscle that comprised his neck would have torn and all they would have pulled out of the ravine was a head.

They stood around him, their shadows falling over the zom like a shroud.

“I’m glad we don’t have to quiet him,” said Nix. The others, even Lilah, nodded.

Benny knelt down and lifted the satchel strap. He had to raise the total slack weight of the sergeant’s head in order to pull the satchel off. He winced but did it anyway. As soon as he had it off, Nix and Riot knelt down and began going through the sergeant’s pockets and laying the items out on a clear patch of dirt. Lilah sorted the items.

They found a rusted multipurpose tool, a Las Vegas poker chip that Ortega was probably carrying as a good-luck charm, a plastic pocket comb, a pencil with a tip that looked like it had been sharpened with a knife, and several folded pieces of paper money of a kind none of them had ever seen. Instead of a picture of a president, the central image was a star, and Benny saw a phrase in Latin: POPULUS INVICTUS.

Nix, reading over his shoulder, translated it. “A Nation Unconquerable.”

Unlike Benny, she had paid attention in language arts.

“I think that’s the motto of the American Nation,” suggested Benny.

Lilah nodded her agreement, but Riot snorted.

“What?” asked Benny, shooting her a look. “You don’t think so?”

“Close to three hundred million Americans have died, son, during the Fall and in the years after,” said Riot. “How many have to croak before y’all consider it game over?”

“All,” said Lilah.

“Absolutely,” agreed Nix. “We’re still fighting.”

“Yeah,” said Benny, nodding. “Besides, it wasn’t our generation who was defeated when the dead rose. I still believe there’s a future, and I intend to be there to see it.”

Riot considered him, and a slow smile spread over her face. “Well look at you, Captain Hero.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Benny, but he was grinning.

The last thing they found was a folded slip of paper with a series of numbers written on it:

“What are those?” asked Riot.

“Map coordinates,” said Benny and Nix at the same time. They’d both taken orienteering in the Scouts.

“Coordinates of what?”

Benny shrugged. “Probably Hope One, but I’d need a map to figure it out.”

He crammed the useless stuff back into the dead sergeant’s pocket. Then they turned their attention to the satchel, which was crammed with papers. In another climate, rain and humidity might have turned the papers to mush or made the ink run and fade. But between the good leather of the satchel and the dry desert heat, most of the papers were legible, though they were all dried to a fragile brittleness. Joe said that Sergeant Ortega had been a logistics coordinator, and the papers bore that out. There were copies of loading manifests, supply lists, personnel lists, written orders, and a lot of stuff that was so heavy with military acronyms that it looked like totally random collections of letters and numbers.

“Well, that’s as helpful as toenails on a snake,” observed Riot.

“What are we looking for?” asked Nix.

“A small leather notebook,” said Benny. “Joe said that if McReady wasn’t onboard the plane when it crashed, then the logistics guy would know where she might be, and that the details would be in a leather notebook he usually carried in his shirt pocket.”

“I checked the pockets,” said Nix. “Nothing.”

They rifled through the satchel again, digging through every pocket and pouch, and came up empty.

Lilah became frustrated with it all and stalked off to scout the vicinity. She soon vanished into the woods.

Depression punched Benny hard in the chest. He sat down heavily and tossed the empty satchel away. Riot and Nix were still huddled together as they went through the crackling papers. They read each page in mounting disappointment and stuffed everything back into the satchel. All that remained were a handful of small scraps of paper, and Nix sat cross-legged going through them.

“Benny!” Nix suddenly cried aloud, and held up one piece of paper. “Look at this. I think I found something.”

Benny hurried over, dropping to his knees between the girls. The slip of paper read:

“Don’t make a lick of sense to me,” said Riot.

But Benny said, “Oh crap…”

“I know,” agreed Nix, and despite the heat she shivered. “God… R3’s.”

“What’s an R3?” asked Riot. “Y’all look like you both swallowed bugs.”

Benny said, “When we first found the plane, we also found one of Dr. McReady’s field reports. She wasn’t just looking for a cure; she was studying several weird new mutations of the zombie plague. She divided the zoms into different groups. R1’s are the normal zoms, the slow shufflers.”

For most of his life those were the only kinds of zoms Benny had known, and his first encounters with them had been absolutely terrifying. He still dreamed of the erosion artist, Mr. Sacchetto, recently risen from the dead, attacking him in Benny’s own living room. Benny nearly lost that fight. Times had changed, though, and Benny knew that he was becoming a skilled fighter. In a pitched fight, he was sure that he and his sword were a match for any six or even eight of them. Unarmed, he figured he could do pretty well against two or three at a time. They were slow, uncoordinated, stupid, and weak.

“The R2 zoms,” continued Benny, “are known as ‘fast walkers’ by McReady’s people — quicker and a lot more coordinated. Nix and I ran into some of them near Yosemite Park and again during the battle of Gameland.”

Benny had fought a couple of the R2’s so far, and it was a whole different matter taking one of them down. He wouldn’t want to try it without a sword.

“So what are R3’s?” asked Riot.

“The fast ones,” said Nix. “Like the ones that attacked me and Lilah yesterday. According to Dr. McReady’s report, the R3’s can problem-solve, evade some attacks, use simple weapons, and even set rudimentary traps.”

“Ah. Like the ones that some genius let out of a crashed airplane.”

Benny shook his head. “Don’t remind me.”

In order to create a diversion that would save Nix from a pack of reapers, Benny had climbed aboard the crashed plane and released all the zoms Dr. McReady’s team had collected: R1’s, R2’s, and a few R3’s. The zoms had created the diversion, and that saved Nix’s life; however, it was one of those same R3 zoms who picked up a stick and nearly bashed Benny’s brains out.

“So, according to this message,” said Benny, “someone spotted R3’s somewhere. I guess ‘activity vcnty of  ’ means ‘activity in the vicinity of,’ right?”

Nix nodded. “And the ‘Rel. Wit.’? What’s that? ‘Reliable witness’?”

“Sounds right.”

“Then what’s DVNP?” asked Riot. “And FTF?”

“FTF sounds familiar,” said Benny. “I’m pretty sure I saw that in the Teambook I gave to Joe. Wait, it’s right on the tip of my brain….” He snapped his fingers a couple of times, then brightened. “Got it. There was a note. Something about Field Team Five.”

“Field Team?” murmured Nix. “If they were going to investigate something like R3 activity, then a ‘field team’ would sound about right.”

“It listed the names, but all I can remember was Dr. McReady. She was at the top of the list.”

They looked at one another for a long time without saying anything, though their eyes said it all.

“Well, skin me and hang me out to dry,” breathed Riot at last. “Doc McReady was never on that plane. At least not when it crashed. Either of you think any different?”

Nix shook her head.

Benny said, “I’ve been thinking that all along. Ever since Joe told me that the D-series notes were missing.”

“If it was a field investigation,” began Nix, “why would she take her research? Why not just send it on to Sanctuary?”

“I don’t know.”

Riot tapped the note that Nix still held. “What’s this part here? ‘DVNP’? Y’all have any clue what that is?”

“I don’t know,” said Benny. “More military initials, maybe? Department of something-something-something.”

“Useful,” said Nix. “No, I think it’s a place. R3 reported in the vicinity of…”

“Vicinity of where?” complained Riot. “They flew from Washington State to Nevada. That’s a lot of gol-durn places to be in the vicinity of.”

Benny took the note and held it firmly between thumb and forefinger. He wanted to shout at it, to make it speak in a human voice and unlock its mysteries.

And then it spoke to him.

Not in words, but in implication.

His head snapped up and whipped around toward the fallen body of Sergeant Ortega.

“No,” he said as he leaped to his feet and ran. “No. No freaking way.”

Nix and Riot stared at each other for a split second, and then they were running after him.

The loose papers were in the satchel. Benny whipped back the flap and began furiously digging through the pages.

“No freaking way,” he said again. “No.” Then he snatched up a small, folded piece of paper, opened it, and yelled, “Yes!”

“What is it?” demanded the girls.

“Joe said that Sergeant Ortega was a real detail-oriented person,” said Benny. “He kept track of everything. Every detail. Even the minor stuff.”

“So what?” asked Riot.

“Well, someone who takes the time to keep track of minor stuff is definitely going to keep track of the important stuff. Like where Dr. McReady and Field Team Five went while investigating mutant zombies. No way that bit of information wasn’t going into his report.”

“Sure. DVNP,” said Nix. “So what? We don’t know what it is or where it is.”

“You’re wrong, Nix. We don’t know what it is or where it is right now, but I think we might have our first real clue.”

He showed them the folded slip of paper.

The map coordinates.

“So what?” asked Riot. “For all y’all know that’s the coordinates for that Hope One place.”

“Maybe,” said Benny, “but Sergeant Ortega had it in his pocket, right? If this was something that was part of the original mission, wouldn’t the coordinates be printed out like all the other mission stuff? No, he wrote this down and it was on him when he died. That means he probably did it while aboard the plane or shortly before. If Dr. McReady went somewhere else, then I don’t think it’s any kind of stretch that these might tell us where she went. This might be the key to ending the plague.”

The three of them stared at him for a long moment and finally burst out laughing. They hugged one another and shouted, and they were only interrupted by the sudden roar of quads as a dozen reapers came tearing out of the forest.

CHAPTER 45

“Run!” screamed Nix as she scrambled to her feet.

But the reapers were already between them and three of their own quads. Only Benny’s machine, the one they’d used to haul Sergeant Ortega out of the ravine, was close at hand.

The reapers closed on them at top speed, dragging behind them tall plumes of tan dust. Sunlight glittered on the sharp steel of their knives and swords.

“God,” cried Benny. He stuffed the papers into his vest pocket, snatched up the satchel and slung it over his shoulder, then quickly drew his sword. “Nix… take the quad and get out of here.”

Nix drew her pistol and raised it in a two-handed grip, setting her feet wide, her body angled the way Tom had taught her.

Riot looked desperately around. “Where’s Lilah? I can’t see her anywhere. Did they get her?”

“No,” breathed Nix, but it was only a denial of that as a possibility. In truth there was no sign of the Lost Girl. Nix swung the barrel toward the closest of the reapers. The sound of their engines was becoming deafening.

Benny raised his sword into the high two-handed grip the samurai used when facing a cavalry charge. It was a lesson Tom had taught them once that none of them ever expected to use. He widened his stance and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, knees bent, ready to cut and evade and run and kill. He could feel his pulse racing faster than the quads.

There was no real chance of escape. They had the zombiefilled ravine behind them and a converging half circle of reapers everywhere else. Even if they managed to cut through the reaper line, those machines could turn and give chase no matter where Benny and the girls ran. And their quad could never get to top speed if all three of them managed to climb aboard. It was a good trap. Smart and well-planned. Benny figured that the reapers had pushed their quads to the edge of the forest, engines off for silence; and then when the trap was set, they fired up the motors and attacked.

Very smart, and Benny approved of the tactical intelligence it showed.

It would be no comfort at all, though, to be slaughtered by intelligent killers.

Dead was dead.

Nix shifted to stand on Benny’s left flank, and Riot moved to his right, a steel ball bearing socketed into the pouch of her powerful slingshot.

Twelve to three. Nix had a gun with five bullets in the cylinder. She was a good shot, so Benny figured she’d get at least three. The ball bearings in Riot’s slingshot were slower than bullets but just as deadly, and she could fire and reload with lightning speed. Benny had his sword. Unless the reapers intended to grind them under the wheels, the killers would have to dismount.

How many could they take?

Six? Eight?

Defeating all twelve was a heroic dream, but not a probability.

If Lilah was here… maybe.

The quads were not slowing.

“They’re going to run us down,” Riot yelled, reading the situation the same way he was.

“Back up,” snapped Benny. “All the way to the edge. They can’t run us down if we’re right on the edge.”

The edge, though, might not hold their combined weight, and Benny knew it. Pulling Sergeant Ortega out of the ravine had weakened an already fragile structure. But that was a different problem. Or maybe it was another problem that would overlap this one, forcing their odds from weak to impossible.

Benny scanned the faces of the reapers as they closed in. All but one of them had red hands tattooed on their faces. They looked wild and fierce, like barbarians out of an old storybook.

As the reapers closed in, they realized that they couldn’t use the machines as weapons. A stern-faced young man — the only reaper not marked with the red hand tattoo — raised his fist, and the reapers revved their engines, the combined drone pulsing like the breath of a gigantic dragon.

He’s the one, thought Benny. He’s their leader.

The young man looked like a warrior. Lean and muscular, with big hands and eyes as hard and dead as desert rocks.

Even through the din, Benny heard Riot say, “Brother Peter… oh my God.”

It was a name that struck a big bell of terror in Benny’s heart. He hadn’t met this man, but he knew about him. He knew him from a thousand terrifying tales Riot had told them. From firsthand descriptions by survivors of reaper massacres. From accounts by monks who had witnessed acts of savagery so grotesque that their minds were scarred by the memories. From surveillance photos Joe had shown them.

Brother Peter, the right hand of Saint John.

Even Joe said that Peter was one of the most dangerous men alive. Deadly with any kind of weapon, and equally deadly in unarmed combat. A man totally without mercy or remorse.

Like an echo from out of the shadowed past, Benny thought he heard Tom’s voice. Don’t give in to fear. Be warrior smart and survive.

Benny nodded as if Tom could see his agreement.

Hot wind blew dust plumes past them, momentarily obscuring them, turning them to wraiths. Then the dust blew past Benny and his friends and on across the ravine. The waist-high grass swayed drunkenly in the breeze.

The reapers were in a tight arc around them. They kept revving their engines, and the sound seemed to beat on Benny’s chest.

“Nix,” he said, speaking just loud enough so she could hear him beneath the pulsing roar of the quads. “If you have to shoot, go for Brother Peter.”

Nix swung the pistol around toward the man.

Brother Peter saw this and smiled. Then he slashed down with his clenched fist, and suddenly all the reapers cut their engines at once.

The silence was crushing. It collapsed the world into a surreal bubble that enclosed the ravine, the killers on the quads, and the three of them.

Where the hell is Lilah? wondered Benny. Did they already get her? Is she dead somewhere out in the forest?

Brother Peter sat in silence, studying them. When his gaze drifted over to Riot, his eyes widened for a moment.

“Sister Margaret,” he said, and the other reapers recoiled at his words. Some of them actually hissed and spat onto the dirt.

“Don’t call me that,” warned Riot.

“Why not? You are the daughter of Mother Rose, that traitorous witch.”

“My mama died a long time ago,” said Riot. “She was just another victim of Saint John and his sickness.”

At this, three of the reapers suddenly made as if to leap off their quads, but Brother Peter held up a hand. “No,” he said. “Words can’t harm the honored saint, and this child can’t tarnish her soul any more than it already is.”

“You can kiss my fanny,” suggested Riot.

“You pile sin upon sin,” said the reaper. “Have you no fear for your soul?”

“My soul’s just fine, thank you.” Her words were flippant, but Benny could hear the fear in her voice. Riot was a tough and brutal fighter, but she was clearly terrified of Brother Peter.

For his part, the reaper seemed not to care that Nix’s pistol was pointed at his head.

Brother Peter looked at Benny. “Do you know who I am?”

“I know,” said Benny. “But I don’t care.”

“You should care.”

“Look, all I care about is you and your goons getting back on your quads and leaving us alone. We didn’t do anything to you, and we don’t want any trouble.”

“Do you know how frightened you sound?”

“Do you know how you’d feel with a bullet in your brainpan?” asked Nix.

“At this range, little sister, you wouldn’t get more than two shots off, and then we’d open red mouths in your pretty skin.”

“Maybe,” conceded Nix. “First shot will still be through your ugly face.”

The reaper shook his head. “So what? Am I supposed to faint from fear? We’re reapers, child. We pray for the darkness to take us. Every morning, every night, we pray that Lord Thanatos takes us.”

“All praise his darkness,” intoned the reapers.

“You say that,” Nix said, “but I’ve seen some of your people run away, too.”

“I was the very first of the reapers,” said Brother Peter. “My companions are members of the Red Brotherhood. Ask Sister Margaret if she thinks we will run away. From you or from anything.”

Riot said nothing, which was not all that encouraging. Benny swallowed a lump of dry dust.

“If you want to test my faith, little sister,” said Brother Peter, “then pull the trigger.”

The gun was steady in Nix’s hand, but when Benny cut a look at her, he could see lines of fear sweat running down her freckled face.

When Nix didn’t answer or fire, Brother Peter nodded. He pointed at Benny. “Yesterday you took something from one of my reapers. Something that was not yours to take.”

“Yeah? Says who?” asked Benny, trying to make his voice sound tough. It didn’t.

“I watched you do it through my binoculars. I saw you arrive, saw your fight with Brother Marcus, and saw you rob him after he’d gone into the darkness.”

Benny said nothing. It made him feel immensely disturbed to know that that had all been witnessed yesterday. He thought of the fight, of his tears, of how vulnerable he must have looked.

Brother Peter nodded to the satchel slung on Benny’s shoulder. “Today you came out here to defile and rob one of the gray people. That bag was not yours to take.”

Nix said, “This gun’s heavy. If you have a point, get to it.”

Benny almost smiled. It was the kind of line he read in novels, and she said it with the kind of bravado he’d tried for a moment ago. Nix was better at it than he was. Benny wasn’t sure if Nix had cribbed it from a book or if she was simply that incredibly cool. Probably both. Despite everything that was happening, he wanted to kiss her.

Brother Peter looked faintly amused, though the expression on his face in no way qualified as a smile. Benny remembered Riot saying that this freak never smiled.

“If you give me what you took,” said Brother Peter, “the bag on your shoulder and whatever you took from my reaper, we will let you go.”

“Oh, really?” said Riot with so much acid that it could have burned the paint off a tank.

“Really,” said Brother Peter.

“Last time I checked,” continued Riot, “you reapers only left people alive when they got down on their knees and kissed your knives. Isn’t that how it works? We get to live if we become reapers too?”

“Oh, fallen sister,” said Brother Peter in a sorrowful tone, “there is no place for you in the Night Church. You are an outcast, forgotten of god, unworthy of the darkness. You are an excommunicate and a blasphemer and you will be punished by a long life of suffering.”

“Suits me,” said Riot.

“Yeah, works for me, too,” agreed Nix.

Benny nodded.

“Really,” repeated Brother Peter. “That appeals to you? A life spent wandering blind and disfigured, screaming for mercy without a tongue, shunned by everyone because your face will bear the mark of damnation upon it.”

Riot proved that her earlier demonstration of foul language had only been a warm-up. She described an act so physically appalling and improbable that even Benny winced — and he appreciated this kind of thing. Several of the reapers blanched and fingered their knives.

“You prove your worthlessness with every breath.” Brother Peter dismissed Riot with a casual wave of his hand and turned his focus back to Benny. “Make your choice, little brother. You can walk away, unharmed, untouched, alive if you give me what does not belong to you. Return what you took from my reaper, and hand over the bag you stole from the dead.”

Benny looked at him, at the other reapers, and at the vast, unforgiving world around them as if it was able to offer answers to the madness of the moment. He held his sword with one hand and touched the strap of the satchel.

“Give me the bag,” said Brother Peter in a voice that was eerily calm. He could have been commenting on the weather. “Give it to me and live.”

“It’s a trick,” said Riot. “Don’t do it.”

“Benny, you can’t,” said Nix.

Benny smiled.

“Sure,” he said.

CHAPTER 46

“What?”

Nix, Riot, and Brother Peter all said it at the same time.

Benny shrugged and lowered his sword. He slid the bag off his shoulder and held it out. “I said, sure. Take it.”

Brother Peter studied him with suspicious eyes. “It would be unwise to try a fast one, little brother, I’ll—”

“I know. Red mouths, tongues cut out. What is it with you guys and threats? You need to work on your people skills.”

Everyone was staring at Benny. He smiled and swung the bag back and forth. His heart thumped like a crazy monkey, but he was sure he was managing a pretty good reckless smile. It hurt his face to keep it in place.

Brother Peter snapped his fingers, and one of the Red Brothers dismounted and stepped forward to take the bag. Nix shifted the pistol toward him, and the reaper stopped.

“If he takes another step,” said Benny, “she’ll blow his head off and then she’ll shoot you.”

The reaper threw a questioning glance at Brother Peter, who gestured for him to remain where he was. Instead he dismounted and held his hand out to Benny.

“The bag,” he said.

Benny wondered if there was even the slightest chance that Brother Peter was not going to kill him the moment he handed over the bag. Riot said that the reaper had a dozen knives hidden in special pockets and that he could draw and cut faster than lightning. She’d seen him do it too many times.

So Benny slung the satchel at him instead of handing it over. He slung it hard, hoping to catch Peter in the mouth, but the man simply snatched it out of the air. He opened the flap, and the dry wind rifled the pages. Brother Peter nodded approval.

“Now give me what you stole from my reaper yesterday,” he said.

“Ah,” said Benny. “That’s going to be a problem.”

Brother Peter lifted an eyebrow.

“I don’t actually have that stuff,” said Benny. “I gave it to Captain Ledger. Maybe you know him? Big guy, real grumpy, has this huge dog?”

“Joe Ledger.” Brother Peter pronounced the name slowly, tasting it, hating it but enjoying it too. Benny could see all that flicker through Peter’s dark eyes, and he also enjoyed the look of profound discomfort that rippled across the faces of the other reapers.

Joe scares the pee of out them, he thought. It elevated the ranger another notch in his book.

“That’s the guy,” Benny said. “So… you’re going to have to ask him for it.”

“No,” said Brother Peter, “I think you’ll go and get it from him and bring it back to me here.”

“You think I’d really do something that stupid just because you ask?”

“I’m not asking you, little brother. I’m telling you.”

Benny shook his head. “No. I played fair. I gave you what we took from the zom. Not going to argue jurisdiction over that stuff. But the stuff I took off the reaper yesterday belongs to me. Your reaper attacked me. That means that anything I took from him is mine by rights. Spoils of war.”

“This isn’t a war, boy.”

“Well, what the hell do you call it?”

“You are defying god’s will.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

Brother Peter sighed. “Then let me simplify things for you. I’ll send you back to Sanctuary. You’ll get whatever you gave to Joe Ledger and bring it back here to me.”

“Why on earth would I do something stupid like that?”

Brother Peter did not answer. Not in words.

He stood a yard away from Nix, apparently ignoring the gun pointed at his head. And then he moved. So hideously fast that there was no time to react or cry out. Brother Peter snatched the pistol from Nix’s hand, spun her, and wrapped an arm around her throat. He let the pistol fall and suddenly there was a knife in his hand, the edge of the blade pressed against the soft flesh beneath Nix’s jaw.

Benny’s sword flashed from its scabbard, but Brother Peter froze him in place with seven horrible words.

“I will paint you with her blood.”

The pistol lay on the ground by Brother Peter’s foot. He kicked it into the ravine.

“And now,” he said calmly, “tell me again that you refuse to get what belongs to me. Tell me, boy, and watch this girl’s life flow out of her.”

“No!” cried Benny.

Nix stared at Benny with wide eyes filled with total terror.

The reapers began climbing off their quads, grins forming on their tattooed faces.

Riot pivoted and aimed her slingshot at the nearest one, but Benny knew that it was no good. She could bring the man down, Benny could take the next few with his sword, but that knife was already at Nix’s throat.

Then suddenly there was a sharp metallic sound behind the reapers. A sound so specific that everyone knew what it was before they turned and looked.

A slide being racked on an automatic pistol.

The Lost Girl rose up out of the tall grass behind the half circle of reapers, her big automatic pistol held in a two-handed grip.

“Let Nix go,” she said in her graveyard whisper of a voice, “or I’ll blow your head off.”

The reapers froze in place, some with weapons half-drawn. Brother Peter turned to face Lilah.

“Kill me and she dies too.”

“You’re threatening to kill her anyway. Might as well kill you first.”

“My reapers of the Red Brotherhood will slaughter you.”

Lilah said, “Look into my eyes. Tell me if you think I care.”

Brother Peter did look into her eyes, and Benny thought he could see something shift in the man’s expression. It was not fear — Benny didn’t think this man was capable of that emotion — but perhaps it was a kind of understanding, of acceptance.

He lowered his knife and gave Nix a small push. She staggered forward, and Benny caught her with one arm. Nix immediately wheeled and tried to kick Brother Peter in the groin. He parried the kick as effortlessly as if he was swatting a fly.

“Nix,” cautioned Benny as he pulled her away from the reaper. She jerked free of his grip and drew her sword. Dojigiri glittered in the bright sunlight, but for all its deadly promise, Brother Peter seemed not to care in the slightest.

Lilah’s pistol was rock-steady in her grip. “Get out of here.”

Without an iota of haste, Brother Peter slid his knife back into its sheath. “Listen to me,” he said softly. “We all walk away from this moment. But understand me — I want what you gave to Captain Ledger. You will bring it to me.”

“Why do you think we’d even consider it?” snapped Nix.

Brother Peter held out his arm, pointing across the miles toward Sanctuary. “Because I think you care about those people at Sanctuary. The sick, the helpless.” He paused. “The children.”

Benny heard Riot’s sharp intake of breath.

“You think that Sanctuary is a fortress,” said the reaper, “that you’re safe there.”

“We are,” said Nix firmly.

Brother Peter picked up the satchel and stowed it in the rear compartment of his quad. “Fail to bring me what you stole and you’ll learn exactly how safe Sanctuary is.”

“She’s right,” said Benny. “Try anything and the army will stop you.”

Brother Peter snorted. The reapers laughed. Harsh, brutal laughs that seemed to be fueled by some certain knowledge of what Brother Peter was suggesting. They winked at one another and traded high fives.

“You’re a strange boy,” said Brother Peter. “Do you really think the ‘army’ will rise to your defense?”

“Me personally? Probably not,” admitted Benny. “I’m no one. But if you try to take it from Captain Ledger, then, sure, they’ll have his back. But it’s stupid. You have knives, they’ve got guns.”

Brother Peter shook his head. “There aren’t enough bullets in the world to stop the will of Thanatos — all praise to his darkness.”

The reapers echoed his words.

“I’ll give you until sunset tomorrow,” said Brother Peter as he climbed onto his quad. “That should be more than enough time to find a way to trick Joe Ledger into returning what you stole. Bring it here and leave it on the edge of the ravine weighted down with a rock. We won’t interfere with you delivering it.”

“Hey, man, I gave you the satchel,” said Benny. “Like I said, I get to keep whatever I found yesterday. Call it a draw.”

“No,” said Brother Peter, “let’s not.”

Lilah edged around to stand with Benny and the others. “Get out of here,” she said.

Brother Peter’s eyes were filled with dark mystery. “There is a storm coming,” he said. “It is the breath of my god, and it will be more powerful than any hurricane you’ve ever seen. The clouds will open and a rain of blood will pour down upon you. The coming storm will blow down the structures of your old world; it will seek out the blasphemers no matter where they hide. It will cleanse the earth, and when it has passed there will be no proof that you — that any of you — ever even lived.”

Benny wanted to hit him with a snappy comeback, but there was something in Brother Peter’s voice, some look in his eye that made the words die on his tongue.

“You have until tomorrow evening,” said Brother Peter. He signaled the reapers to start their engines. They turned and drove away, crossed the clearing, and passed single file into the forest.

CHAPTER 47

The Lost Girl lowered her gun and picked up her spear.

Nix let out a long, ragged breath, sheathed her sword, turned, and punched Benny in the chest as hard as she could.

“Wait — OWW! What was that for?” he bellowed.

“You just gave him the satchel?” seethed Nix. “You just up and handed over the only clues we have to where Dr. McReady might be?”

“No, I—”

“What in tarnation is going on in your head, boy?” asked Riot. “Or is there anything at all happening in there?”

“No,” said Lilah, “he’s not very bright.”

“Look, I—”

Nix shook her head in complete disgust. “And are you planning on asking Joe for that stuff?”

“Good luck with that,” said Riot, and added under her breath, “moron.”

“Hey, wait, I—”

“What were you thinking, Benny?” asked Nix.

“You guys are great,” he said sarcastically. “Thanks for the vote of confidence… but I’m not actually stupid.”

He reached into his vest pocket for something and held it out an inch from Nix’s face. The girls studied the papers. Nix took one; Riot took the other. Lilah came and peered over their shoulders.

Nix’s read: URGENT: REPT OF R3 ACTIVITY VCNTY OF DVNP — REL. WIT. *** FTF?

Riot’s read: +36°30′ 19.64", — 117°4′ 45.81"

Lilah said, “Wait… what?”

“I don’t know what Brother Peter was looking for,” said Benny, “but I’m guessing this is it.”

A slow smile formed on Nix’s face and even her freckles seemed to glow.

“I shoved those in my pocket when I saw the quads. Nothing else in the satchel looked to be important.”

Riot grinned and shook her head. “By golly, boy, you are as slick as a greased weasel.”

“Thanks, I think.”

Lilah gave him an appraising stare as if surprised that he wasn’t mentally deficient after all.

Nix’s smile faltered. “What happens when Brother Peter realizes he doesn’t have these?”

“How do we even know that he knows what he’s looking for?” asked Benny. “They must have been watching us and saw us take the satchel. Then they saw us put stuff back into the satchel, and now they have it. What we need is to get our butts back to Sanctuary.” He paused. “Yesterday Joe told me that when they couldn’t find the D-series records, we lost our last chance to beat this thing. I don’t think that’s true.”

Nix said, “What do you think Brother Peter meant about a storm coming?”

“He was bluffing,” said Benny. “Lilah had a gun on him and he was talking trash.”

Lilah gave a slow shake of her head. “No, he wasn’t.”

“You don’t think so?” asked Benny.

“Snow White’s right,” said Riot. “Brother Peter wasn’t bluffing at all, no sir. You could tell it from his voice. He thinks he’s going to win.”

“Against Sanctuary?” Nix laughed. “Against Captain Ledger and the soldiers? How?”

No one had an answer to that.

“Then it’s some kind of weapon,” said Lilah. “Something we haven’t seen yet.”

“Reapers only use knives,” said Nix.

Riot shrugged. “Before I left them, they would never have used a quad. It was old-world science, totally taboo. Now look. So who knows what else they might try?” Riot shook her head. “No… we have to be ready for them to do anything at all to win.”

Without another word they got their quads and raced back to Sanctuary.

CHAPTER 48

Brother Peter pulled his quad into the cleft of a tumble of huge rocks and killed the engine. Sister Sun sat on a stool under the shade of an awning erected for her by her reaper bodyguards. She sipped water from a plastic cup. She looked older than her years and as frail as an icicle on a warm morning.

“How did it go?” she asked as Brother Peter came over and sat down across from her.

He poured himself some water, sipped it, and set his cup aside.

“It went exactly as planned,” he said.

She reached out and patted his hand.

“Good.”

CHAPTER 49

The sign read SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROAD.

It made Saint John smile, as much for the visceral imagery that it conjured in his mind as for the poetry that he always found written into the mundane events of each day.

He stood in the shade of a billboard on which a smugly smiling figure once promised that everyone could, without question, hear him now. Saint John had never owned a cell phone. Even before the Fall he had believed that they whispered suggestions of temptation in the ear and sucked away both common sense and faith the way a tick sucks blood. Besides, before the dead rose, whenever Saint John felt the need to say something of importance to someone, he took them to some remote place and shared his secrets in the pauses between screams.

The weeds and grasses grew tall all around the billboard, and a haphazard forest of young trees had grown up along the road. The road surface was cracked by roots and weather, but it was relatively clear of vegetation. When Saint John’s scouts saw this, they alerted him, and a platoon of the Red Brotherhood had come this way, following what was clearly a well-traveled route. Dried mud from recent rains showed the marks of horses’ hooves, wagon wheels, and booted footprints. A trade route or something else had been the guess, and now here was the proof.

Four trade wagons made their slow way along the road. All of them had been converted from farm carts. The frames were a mix of truck chassis and wooden cart wheels, with big boxes bolted to the frame. Each box was covered in sheet metal, and the teams of horses were protected by carpet coats covered in nets made of steel washers connected by heavy-gauge wire. The horses of the men riding alongside the carts were similarly armored, and all the men and women in the party wore ankle-length carpet coats, thick leather gloves, and helmets of all kinds, including fencing masks, football helmets, old Norman steel caps looted from museums, and even a plastic fishbowl with holes cut for ventilation. There were four mounted riders and ten guards on foot. Everyone was armed, and apart from knives and swords, many of them had guns.

It was a considerable defensive force, and old bleached bones lying along the road spoke to the effectiveness of their many preparations.

Saint John approved of the weapons, the clever design of the carpet coats and metal armor. All of it was more than sufficient to stop an attack by the living dead.

“Take them,” said Saint John.

The reapers of the Red Brotherhood, who had been poised like a fist, struck.

Arrows, carefully aimed, darkened the sky for a moment, and then bodies were falling and horses were screaming. Suddenly all those careful preparations disintegrated as predators far more dangerous than the walking dead proved what all wise killers already knew: that nothing was more dangerous than living men.

CHAPTER 50

Once Benny and the girls were back at Sanctuary, they parked their quads and hurried over to the bridge.

“We need to see Captain Ledger,” said Nix urgently.

The guards said nothing. They didn’t even look at her.

“Hey,” said Benny loudly, “we’re speaking to you.”

Nothing.

Riot pointed. “Look, y’all, the Lost Girl is breaking her fifty-foot restriction. She’s right here at the edge of the trench. I think y’all ought to report that to Captain Ledger.”

One of the guards looked at Lilah, smiled, then shrugged. It was the most extensive response any of the bridge guards had ever given them.

“Screw this,” muttered Benny as he tried to push past the soldiers and reach for the cotter pin that held the bridge.

The closest soldier shoved him. Very fast and very hard.

There was a rasp of steel and Nix’s sword, Dojigiri, flashed in the sunlight.

A hundredth of a second later there were guns pointed at them. One each at Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Riot. M16s, fully automatic rifles.

“I’m going to tell you this once,” said the guard who’d pushed Benny. “Walk away. Do it right now or we will fire. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a discussion. Walk away.”

“We need to see Captain Ledger,” insisted Benny.

“First bullet goes through your kneecap, boy,” said the guard. “You call it.”

They walked away, but within ten paces Benny broke into a run.

CHAPTER 51

“What did they find, my sister?” asked Brother Peter. He crouched like a pale ape on an outcropping of red rock.

The engine of Sister Sun’s quad was off, but she still sat in the saddle, resting her weight on the handlebars. She sighed and sat back, resting a hand on the satchel that lay on her thighs.

“This,” she said.

Brother Peter jumped down from the rock and took the satchel. He quickly and thoroughly searched the papers.

“The coordinates?”

“Gone,” said Sister Sun.

They looked at each other.

And smiled.

It was an unlooked-for piece of luck.

Not blind luck, though. It was, to them, proof of the power of their god.

CHAPTER 52

Benny hunched over the handlebars of his quad and gunned the engine.

“What are you doing?” yelled Nix over the roar.

“Remember in the Scouts Mr. Feeney said that survival requires a proactive attitude?”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m being proactive.”

Any comment Nix might have made was lost beneath the roar as he shot past her, engine bellowing, wheels kicking sand behind him. He thought he heard her screaming his name, but he didn’t look back.

Benny shot past the playground and the orchard. The monks and the children all stared at him, but no one said anything. Or maybe he heard one of the older monks yelling even louder than Nix had. Something about slowing down, probably. Benny chose not to hear that admonition. This wasn’t a convenient time for obeying rules.

This was a time for taking action.

The trench was forty yards ahead. Once he cleared the last of the orchards, he angled left, heading toward the point where the steel bridge was lowered twice a day. There was a yard-long lip of metal that stuck out over the drop, and it was wider than the bridge. Good enough on either side for the wheel width of the quad.

Benny hoped.

On the other side of the trench there was only a metal plate. No bridge or other obstructions.

He had never done this before, of course. Not even in his head.

It was all a matter of speed and angle.

And luck.

“Come on, Tom,” he growled as he gave the quad more gas. “Little help from beyond would be cool.”

He gave the engine all the gas it would take, and the motor roared like a living thing. Feral and alive and powerful.

“Come on… come on!” Benny yelled.

The raised bridge was there, right there, the four soldiers flanking it. They gaped at him as if he was absolutely out of his mind. Benny could see their point.

Two of them brought up their rifles, and Benny flattened out over the steering column, making himself the smallest possible target.

Of course, if a bullet did hit him, it would nail him on the top of the head. That gave him a moment’s pause. The quad, undeterred by thoughts of mortality, kept racing onward.

“HALT!” roared the guards.

There was the hollow krak-krak-krak of gunfire.

Benny braced against the impact.

Felt nothing.

Kept going.

Benny hurtled toward the bridge, gathering every ounce of speed, and then at the last possible second he turned the wheels and the quad shot past the guards and past the upraised steel and flew out over empty space.

There was a single bump as one rear wheel brushed the edge of the gate. Just that one tap; Benny had done it right.

He screamed — loud and raw and free — as the sense of speed seemed to vanish and the quad hung in the air, untethered by gravity, a beautiful soaring thing. Below him the twenty-foot span of the trench seemed to move with a strange slowness, as if time itself had wound down. He looked down and saw, with a flash of panic, that the front wheels were already starting to dip toward the bottom of the trench, and the far side looked a million miles away. Benny pulled on the handlebars as if he could lift the whole machine through sheer force of muscle and will.

Then the lip of the trench was there, and the soft tires chunked down onto the ground inches past it. There was a second thump as the rear wheels hit, and the jolt rattled Benny’s bones and snapped his teeth shut. His hands were still rolled forward, still feeding gas to the engine, so there was a moment when inertia and impact and gravity collided into a grinding nothing as wheels turned and great plumes of tan sand kicked up behind him and the quad shivered like it was coming apart. Then the tire treads bit deep and the thrust of the engine overcame the downward pull of gravity, and Benny’s quad shot forward like a bullet from a gun.

Benny let rip a yell of rough joy and sheer excitement.

Krak! Krak!

He could hear the shots, but nothing hit him. Or he prayed not. There was no pain, no heavy thud of impact, no burn of ruined nerves and tissues.

He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw that two of the soldiers were sprawled on the ground. Benny slewed to a sideways stop that built a wall of dust between him and the zoms. The dust seemed to freeze there — a brown stain painted on the moment. A third soldier — the one who had refused to pass along the message to Captain Ledger — leaned against the bridge, clutching what looked like a badly broken nose. The fourth was standing, unarmed, with his hands raised.

Nix, Lilah, and Riot had apparently come up on the soldiers’ blind side while they were shooting at Benny.

Well, thought Benny, I guess it sucks to be them.

Even so, he hoped the girls hadn’t injured anyone too badly. It was just too bad the guards lacked the sense, permission, or manners to pass along a simple message.

Benny saw Nix turn to him and shake her head in exasperation. He knew that had she been aware of his plan, Nix would have done anything she could to stop him. And yet… a big, bright smile blossomed on her face.

Lilah glanced at Benny and gave him a brief nod.

Benny was sure he’d get an earful about his rashness, but for the moment some other guys were taking the brunt of the collective female outrage. He was very cool with that.

Movement made him turn, and he saw that the dead, all four hundred thousand of them, were facing him. And shuffling his way. Here and there Benny could see zoms dressed in black clothes adorned with red cloth streamers tied to wrists and ankles. These were reapers who had died in the big fight three weeks ago. Benny recognized a few of their faces. The reapers looked like ordinary people — well, zommed-out versions of ordinary people — but they had been so vicious in life, so determined to end all life. That concept was more alien to Benny than the fact that these people were now undying corpses.

Life is truly weird, he thought. And it’s not getting any less weird the farther I get from home.

Then, with a collective moan of boundless hunger that shook the world, and the tramp of eight hundred thousand withered feet, they surged toward him. When he’d first met Joe Ledger, the ranger had estimated two hundred thousand zoms. The monks counted twice that many.

And he laughed.

“Bite me!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

He fed fuel into the quad and kicked it forward, first racing toward the advancing wall of death, and then at the last second cutting to the left, zooming away from the hangar and the concrete blockhouse, past the silent blood-splashed jet, shooting down the line of reaching hands, driving at full speed toward the far end of the runway.

The zombies all turned to follow.

He soon outpaced them. The farther Benny went, the fewer the zoms. Soon he was in open country, where only a solitary zombie wandered in a slow and pointless circle, its sad pattern created by a missing foot. Benny cut right, heading toward the squat building at the foot of the row of siren towers.

He cast a quick look over his shoulder and saw that he was at least half a mile ahead of the leading edge of the zombie wave.

Perfect.

He drove over to the small building. A soldier stepped out, rifle in hand.

“Stop right there,” he commanded. “Who are you and what are you doing over here? This is a restricted area.”

“No kidding,” said Benny. “I need you to turn the sirens on.”

The soldier began raising the rifle.

Benny immediately spun the quad to kick up a thick cloud of choking dust. Then he shot south along the line of siren towers. He cursed aloud, repeating every foul phrase he’d learned from Riot. That girl had a truly poisonous mouth, and Benny felt a little embarrassed grumbling those descriptions, even though no one could hear him.

The zoms kept coming, drawn as much by the dust plume as by the roar of the quad. The dust plume was hundreds of feet high now, and the breeze, though slight, was steady — it continued to push the plume, reshaping it, shoving it away toward the mountains. The dead followed as if mesmerized.

Once Benny was sure he was well beyond the range of any rifle shot, he roared up and down at the base of the mountains, luring the zoms.

“Come on,” Benny said through gritted teeth. “Come on…”

It took the zoms nearly twenty minutes to reach him.

When the closest zoms were fifteen feet away, Benny fed gas to the quad and shot away, running even farther to the south. They turned like an inhuman tidal surge, but he was moving too far and too fast. Then Benny cut right and right again to head north, but he angled away from where the mass of zoms were, keeping the engine speed low so that it purred rather than growled. The zoms would eventually hear him, but not right away.

By the time he got back to the blockhouse, Nix and the others had finished tying the soldiers up. Lilah stood over them, her Sig Sauer pistol held loosely at her side. Riot and Nix were trying to figure out how the locking assembly on the bridge worked. Dozens of monks had come out of the other buildings on that side of the trench. Some harangued the girls for their violence, but most watched in a kind of mute fascination.

Benny pulled to a stop by the blockhouse air lock. He killed the engine, dismounted, and did a very quick, very quiet circuit of the entire building to make sure that he hadn’t missed any zoms.

There wasn’t a single dead person around.

Benny grinned.

He ran to the edge of the trench and called Nix’s name.

The first thing she said was, “You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah, not a news flash.”

“But I love you.”

He nodded past her to the soldiers. “They okay?”

She gave a single, cold, dismissive shrug.

What amazed Benny was the difference between his lingering male-centric perception of girls as weaker, shy, and incapable of violence or cruelty and the way they actually were. And it wasn’t like he had seen any proof to the contrary. Lilah was a walking statement about girl power. So was Riot. And Nix, who was every bit as good with a sword as Benny was. Even with all that, the splinter of gender prejudice still festered in his mind. He wondered if he would ever stop being surprised when his preconceptions were trounced by the truth.

Riot sauntered to the edge. “Y’all got an actual plan, boy, or are you hoping for divine intervention?”

“Little of both,” Benny admitted.

“Do we get to know the plan?”

“It’s simple,” he said. “I’m going to knock on the door until they let me in.”

The girls gave him long, flat stares.

“Hey,” Benny said, “I’m open to better suggestions.”

Lilah, who had been listening, called, “Knock loud.”

He knocked loud.

CHAPTER 53

“Open the damn door!” Benny yelled, and he yelled it so loudly that echoes banged off the distant red rock mountain and ricocheted back to him over the heads of the hundreds of zombies who now shambled slowly back toward him. His fist ached and his throat was getting raw, but he stood there and kept at it. Hammering, yelling.

“Kid… yo, kid!” a voice said. “They can’t hear you.”

Benny whirled to see the big ranger, Joe, standing behind him. He hadn’t heard him approach.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Originally? Baltimore. Just now — the hangar.”

“It took you long enough.” Benny massaged his hand. “Where have you been?”

“Busy. Want to tell me why you and your crew of girl-thugs just beat the crap out of four soldiers? And while you’re at it, how about explaining the stunt with the quad? I’ve seen stupid and I’ve seen stupid but that was—”

“Stupid, yeah, I saw where you were going with that.”

That put a half smile on Joe’s face. “So — what’s the deal? Is this about seeing your friend Chong? Roughing up soldiers and breaking rules isn’t going to—”

“I’m trying to get inside,” said Benny. He gave the door another hit.

“I figured that much, which is why I came out here. I’m trying to keep you from wasting your time.” Joe pointed at the tall steel doors set into the concrete facade of the building. “Read my lips here, kid, try to follow. They. Can’t. Hear. You.”

“Why not?”

“It’s an ultra-secure soundproof hardened facility. It’s designed to withstand anything except a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. You could march up and down all day long with a brass band and they won’t hear a peep. Nothing. Nada. Am I getting through to you in any way?”

Benny ignored him.

“It’s also designed to keep out a gazillion zombies like the ones who are — oh yeah, coming this way.”

“They won’t be here for at least ten minutes.”

Joe grunted. “Fair enough. Door’s still going to be locked when they get here… and the geeks inside won’t even know that the zoms are chowing down on a pigheaded teenager.”

“Why?” he demanded. “They have to know we’re out here.”

“They do. Once in a while one of them even looks at us on a video monitor.”

“On a what?”

“A kind of electronic window.”

“Then if they’re looking at us, why don’t they open the door?”

“Why would they?”

Benny pointed backward, jabbing a finger at the building. “Because I’m knocking.”

“No offense, kid, but who the hell are you?”

Benny punched him.

He didn’t even know he was going to do it. His hand was already moving when it clenched into a knot and slammed into the side of Joe’s jaw.

The blow had all of Benny’s anger and frustration in it.

It rocked Joe. It knocked him back half a step.

And that was all it did.

Benny threw a second punch, but Joe caught that one in his open palm like a shortstop catching a grounder. Joe’s fingers closed around Benny’s fist like iron bars. Then his hand darted out and clutched a fistful of Benny’s shirtfront, and suddenly Benny was up on his toes, nose to nose with the ranger. Joe’s blue eyes bored into him like drills, and the man’s mouth twitched as if he fought to bite down on the words he wanted to say.

Finally he smiled and pushed Benny back.

He rubbed his jaw. “Nice punch. I honestly can’t tell you the last time anyone caught me with a sucker punch.”

“I hope it hurts.”

“It does,” Joe admitted. “Though… probably not as much as your hand.”

Benny was trying to ignore his hand. It was a white-hot ball of pain at the end of his wrist.

“Let me tell you something, kid,” said Joe. “Because you’re Tom Imura’s brother, and because you’re probably not recovered from that head wound you got, I’m going to let this slide. I can understand you being upset — your best friend is in there and maybe he’s dying or maybe he’s already zommed out — but you need to learn how to pick your fights. I’m not your enemy, and I’m not much in favor of being a punching bag for someone who wants to vent.”

“I can’t let Chong die without doing everything I can,” said Benny. “I can’t.”

“Fine, I admire that. Bravo for you,” said Joe. “How is all this crap going to help him?”

Benny dug his hand into his pocket and removed the two slips of paper.

“We went out to the Ruin today,” he said. “To a ravine near where the plane went down.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where Sergeant Ortega is. Or was. He’s dead. Really dead, I mean.”

Joe narrowed his eyes and nodded to the pieces of paper. “You took those from him?”

“Yes.” Benny handed one of the slips to Joe. “I think we found out where Dr. McReady is.”

Joe studied the paper. It was the message that read: URGENT: REPT OF R3 ACTIVITY VCNTY OF DVNP — REL. WIT. *** FTF?

Benny watched the big man’s reaction. Joe went dead pale. Then his eyes widened and widened until Benny thought they’d bug out of his head.

“Where…?”

Benny explained about the visit to the ravine, how they pulled Sergeant Ortega out, what they found, and the subsequent confrontation with Brother Peter and the Red Brotherhood.

“He said he wanted what I gave you.”

“Fat chance,” said Joe.

“He said that if I didn’t give it to him by sundown tomorrow, the reapers were going to attack Sanctuary.”

Benny expected Joe to laugh that off, but he didn’t

“Joe?” asked Benny. “The reapers can’t actually take Sanctuary… can they?”

But Joe didn’t answer. “Where’s the satchel you took from Sergeant Ortega?”

“I… um… gave it to Brother Peter.”

Joe’s face went from bloodless to a livid and dangerous red.

“Are you deranged?” thundered the ranger. For the second time he grabbed a fistful of Benny’s shirt. “You stupid, boneheaded little—”

And Benny held up the second slip of paper.

The one with the coordinates.

“You soldiers have been at war too long,” said Benny. “Try having some faith in other people.”

Joe stared at the paper. It had been neatly torn in half. “This is only half of it….”

“I know. We’ll give you the other half as soon as you give me your word on two things.”

“You’re on thin ice, boy,” said Joe in a low and dangerous voice.

Benny leaned toward him. “I’ve been on thin ice since zombies ate the world. I want your word on two things. Two conditions.”

Joe studied him with steely eyes. “What conditions?”

“First, you tell me what’s going on inside the lab and the hangar.”

“Believe me, kid, you don’t want to know.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to know. And don’t assume that I can’t handle it.”

“What’s the other condition?”

“You take me with you,” said Benny. “Me, Nix, Riot, and Lilah.”

Benny waited, his whole body tensing for the argument, the outrage, the refusal that he knew was coming. The ranger looked past him at the three fierce girls on the other side of the trench. Then he turned and looked at the zoms, who were less than a quarter mile away. Finally he looked down at the torn piece of paper in his hand.

“You’re doing all of this because of your friend? Because of that Chong kid?”

“I’m doing this because this is our world too. You don’t have a right to shut us out of the process of saving it.”

Joe drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose.

“Let me tell you something, kid,” he said. “Because I liked your brother, I’m going to forget that you’re trying to extort me here.”

“Thanks, but it’s not extortion,” snapped Benny. “And even if it was, I can’t let Chong die without doing everything I can.”

Joe looked up to judge the angle of the sun. “You have one hour to pack. One change of clothes, water and food for a week, every weapon you have. You meet me at the bridge and have the rest of those coordinates.”

Benny dug a hand into his pocket and removed the other half of the paper and held it out for Joe. The ranger smiled and took it.

Benny smiled back. “Like I said — you should have more faith in people.”

CHAPTER 54

Blowflies swarmed around Saint John as he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes and mouth composed and thoughtful, his dark clothes glistening with blood. The cooks and their assistants were busy butchering the slaughtered horses. The quartermasters of the reaper army were searching through the trade goods in the four wagons for anything of value. Much of what the traders had brought with them was sinful — paperback books, holy books from a dozen false religions, jewelry, antibiotics, toys, luxuries. Things that made people want to enjoy being alive, and how grave an insult that was to Thanatos — praise to his darkness — who had decreed that human life should end, that anyone who stayed alive did so as an affront to god. Except for the reapers, and they all knew that when the great cleansing was done, they would open red mouths in one another and go into the darkness, where a vast and eternal nothingness awaited them.

The saint’s orders to his reapers had been precise: Kill no one.

The flight of arrows that had stopped this convoy had been precisely aimed. To kill the horses, to wound every other guard. The effect was a predictable one. As the uninjured guards saw their fellows to the left and right of them fall, saw the arrows and the blood, heard the shrill screams of pain and fear, their hearts fled them. They threw down their weapons and begged for quarter. For mercy.

Only two guards possessed courage greater than their own sense of self-preservation. Or perhaps they believed themselves to be powerful enough to fight through this attack. One man, a Latino with a barrel chest, leaped from his dying Tennessee walking horse. He wore a necklace of wedding bands and carried a pump shotgun, which he emptied into the first wave of Red Brothers. When the gun was empty, he dropped it and drew a Glock nine-millimeter pistol and killed eight more reapers before the next wave crashed into him. The man went down hard. He killed and maimed with a knife he took away from one of the Red Brothers, and when that became lodged in the chest of a reaper, the Latino used his bare hands.

Saint John shouted to his reapers to take this man alive.

They did, but the figure they dragged before the saint had a dozen red mouths in his flesh and one foot already in the darkness. It saddened Saint John. This was the kind of fighter who, had he been encouraged to kneel and kiss the blade, would have made a superb Red Brother.

Saint John stood over him now, hands clasped, lips pursed. The other survivors were being tied up. Some were being taught the manners necessary to survive an interview with the saint. Their screams filled the air.

“What is your name, brother?”

The Latino glared up at him. “Hector Mexico,” he snarled. Then he punctuated that with a string of obscenities in English and Spanish that made the reapers around Saint John blanch.

The saint ignored the words and their suggestions of improbable physical acts.

“You are dying,” he said. “The darkness hungers for you.”

Hector Mexico spat blood onto Saint John’s shoes. “Maybe so, pendejo, but I put twenty of your boys in the dirt, so kiss my—”

Even the reapers who watched did not see Saint John draw his knife. All they saw was a blur of movement, and then the Latino man screamed as the tip of the knife drew a line across his forehead.

“No,” said Saint John, showing him the knife. “Bravado and insults will not ease your journey. You have insulted my god. There will be no heroic end to your tale.”

Hector had to grit his teeth to keep another scream locked in his throat.

“Unless,” said Saint John mildly, “you do a simple service for the Night Church.”

Hector said nothing.

“Tell me the best and quickest route to the town of Mountainside.”

Hector shook his head.

“Or any of the Nine Towns.”

Silence.

Saint John sighed, then signaled to his reapers. “Bring another one.”

They dragged a wounded and terrified young man over. He had blond hair and freckles and could not have been older than eighteen. They forced him to his knees in front of Hector.

The saint stood over the boy, his blade in his hand.

“I need to know the way to the Nine Towns,” he said. “I only need one of you to tell me. That person will not need to spend his last hours screaming for death as the things that define him as a human being are removed one piece at a time. That person will be welcomed into the Night Church and will become one of us.”

He held the knife out and let blood drip onto the dirt between Hector and the young man.

“Who will it be?”

Hector said, “Don’t do it, Lonnie. Be a man… it won’t hurt for long….”

But Saint John said, “Oh yes, my brothers, it will. It will hurt for such a long and delicious time.”

One voice spoke out, begging to tell.

The other screamed out, cursing and damning the reapers.

Through it all, Saint John smiled and smiled.

CHAPTER 55

Joe arranged for the sirens to call off the zoms so Benny could cross the trench and go pack. When Benny and the girls returned to the bridge with their gear, there were four new soldiers guarding it. The soldiers were pale-faced strangers Benny had never seen before.

As Benny approached, one of them, a hatchet-faced man with startlingly blue eyes, put his hand on the butt of his holstered .45. He had the faintest echoes of facial bruising that was almost gone, and a purple scar through his eyebrow that looked like it had required at least eight stitches. His name tag read PERUZZI. He ignored Benny and locked a lethal stare on Lilah.

“I remember you,” Peruzzi said with a malicious grin.

“You should,” said Lilah, unperturbed by the implied menace in that smile. Benny realized that Peruzzi had to be one of the soldiers Lilah had roughed up after Chong nearly died. Several of the soldiers had been hospitalized. When he glanced at the others, he could see similar traces of recent trauma.

Oops, he thought.

“What’s your problem?” demanded Nix, standing firm beside Lilah. “Who are you?”

“Nobody’s talking to you, pint-size,” said Peruzzi.

“Well, I’m talking to you,” said Nix.

Peruzzi laughed and gave her a slow, invasive up-and-down stare. “Big boobs don’t make you a grown-up, little girl,” he said in an ugly voice. “Mind your manners and shut your mouth.”

Benny’s hand flashed toward his sword, but the solder had his pistol out so fast the blade was only a quarter drawn. The barrel dug hard into Benny’s cheek, right beside his nose.

“Give me a reason,” said Peruzzi.

The other soldiers chuckled, and they swung their rifles up toward the girls.

Peruzzi sneered. “You suckered those idiots who were working this detail earlier. You ever touch any of my men again and I’ll hurt you in ways you ain’t ever heard of.”

The gun barrel was cold, but it felt hot against Benny’s skin. He was absolutely terrified, but at the same time a vicious rage was boiling in his gut.

“Y’all better put that gun down,” advised Riot.

“And y’all better shut your ugly mouth,” said Peruzzi, mocking her Appalachian accent.

“Just trying to give you fair warning is all,” she said, seemingly unflustered by the guns.

“Yeah, well how about you kiss my—”

And there was a low growl.

A deep-chested growl that sounded like it came from a bear.

Riot smiled. Everyone else turned to see Grimm standing inches behind the rearmost soldier, dressed in his full battle armor except for the spiked helmet. The dog was more massive than even the largest of the men, and anger made muscles bunch and flex under his hide. The motion clanked the chain mail he wore, and yet everyone had been so absorbed in the confrontation that they hadn’t noticed the mastiff’s approach.

The big ranger, Joe, walked slowly toward the group. He was dressed in camouflage, with boots, gun belt, sidearm, sword, and rifle. He carried a heavy duffel bag easily in one hand.

Nobody said a word as the ranger drew near. However, Peruzzi lowered his pistol.

“Grimm,” said Joe, “down.”

The dog immediately stopped growling and sat. But his eyes burned with a clear desire to bite something that would scream.

Joe walked up to Peruzzi and then kept walking so that the soldier had to give ground and back away. He backed the man all the way to the upraised bridge. Peruzzi’s shoulders, heels, and the back of his head thumped against the steel. Without taking his eyes off Peruzzi, Joe reached down and took his pistol away from him. He dropped the magazine into the sand, ejected the round, and tossed the pistol into the trench.

Peruzzi opened his mouth with the beginning of a sharp protest, but Joe leaned in so close that their foreheads touched.

“Go ahead, sergeant,” murmured Joe quietly, “say it. Say something. Tell me exactly what’s on your mind, because as you know I’ve always been fascinated by the particular species of thoughts that evolve in your brain. It’s like science fiction sometimes. Hard to believe a human brain is at work here.”

Peruzzi was able to hold eye contact with Joe for three seconds, and then he looked down. But Joe wasn’t interested. He leaned back far enough to bring his hand up between them and tap Peruzzi sharply on the forehead.

“I didn’t catch that,” he said. “I missed the part where you apologized to these young women and to my friend Benjamin here.”

“S-sorry,” mumbled Peruzzi.

Joe patted his cheek. “Yeah, I know you are.” His back was still turned to the other three soldiers. “It would suck for all parties involved if I turned around and saw that you three stooges were still pointing your weapons rather than standing at attention with rifles slung.”

Grimm growled again, softly but meaningfully.

The soldiers snapped to attention.

Joe gave Peruzzi a last penetrating stare. “We’re not going to have this discussion again, are we, Sergeant Peruzzi?”

“No, sir.”

“And I can sleep soundly at night — every night — in the sure knowledge that nothing untoward will happen to these four young people here… or their friend in the blockhouse. I mean, we can agree on that, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Joe smiled. It was a big, toothy, happy smile. What Mayor Kirsch would have called an “aw shucks” smile. Benny knew that the humor in that smile went less than a millimeter deep.

“Good,” said the ranger. “Now how about signaling the siren house and then getting this bridge down?”

The soldiers turned quickly away and set to work.

Joe glanced briefly at Nix, Lilah, Riot, and Benny. “Can’t stand around trading Zombie Cards all day, kids. We’re burning daylight.”

CHAPTER 56

Saint John raised his face to let the bloodred heat of the dying sun bathe his face.

He could hear the rustle of the reapers behind him. The Red Brotherhood formed the first ranks — five hundred strong. Beyond them was the main body of the reaper army.

Teams of quartermasters ran along the ranks with buckets brimming with the chemical created by Sister Sun. Every reaper dipped his red tassels in the buckets and retied them to ankles and wrists, threaded them through belt loops, and pinned them to their shirts between the outspread angel wings. This was the most noxious and powerful version of the chemical, the formula revised by Sister Sun to accommodate the spike in aggression from the gray people. Sometimes a reaper would be dragged down and consumed regardless of the chemicals, but that was okay. If it happened, then god willed it to be so, and the surviving reapers celebrated as one of their own went on into the darkness.

Besides, Saint John could afford to lose a few reapers. He could afford to lose hundreds. The army had grown as riders on quads contacted units scattered all over California, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Some of those riders had been sent out on the night Saint John walked away from Mother Rose’s defeat at the gates of Sanctuary. He had over three hundred working quads and many thousands of reapers. Some of those reapers had kissed the knife as recently as this afternoon. Among the new acolytes were former trade guards and bounty hunters who lived in the Nine Towns. They had been so eager, so willing to share every secret of each of those towns.

What amazed Saint John, even after everything he had seen and learned about the foolishness of people, was that most of the towns had only chain-link fences for protection against the gray people.

As if the dead were the only threat.

As if the dead were even a serious threat.

As if the will of god were so easily ignored.

It angered Saint John. He felt that it showed no respect at all for the importance of his mission. It felt like a challenge, a boast. Or an invitation to prove to each and every sinner behind those frail walls that the will of Thanatos — all praise to his darkness — could not be deterred.

He opened his eyes and looked once more at the sign that had caused him to stop and savor the moment. It was not one of the machine-printed road signs from before the Fall. This was hand-painted on the side of an empty hardware store that squatted by the side of the four-lane highway.

The road sloped downward for a thousand yards and stopped at the gates of a chain fence. He touched the silver dog whistle that hung around his neck.

“ ‘Welcome to Haven,’ ” Saint John read aloud, enjoying each separate syllable.

He lifted the whistle to his lips.

It was not the reaper army that he called.

The answer to his call was a moan of hunger so loud that the thunder of it rolled down the hill toward those metal gates.

CHAPTER 57

When the zoms were all at the far end of the airfield, Joe motioned for Benny and the girls to follow him, and he led them past the blockhouse and the first two hangars. Grimm trotted beside him, his armor clanking with each step; and he kept throwing angry glances at the sirens and the zoms. A sturdy chain-link fence was in place to create a safe corridor between the zoms and the hangars. The frame of the fence was mounted on wheels so the whole thing could be swung wide for aircraft and other vehicles. The main doors of the hangars were closed, but Benny saw that smaller doors stood ajar, and he went over to peer inside.

The first hangar was filled with parts of dead machines: helicopters, small planes, tanks, armored personnel carriers, Jeeps, Humvees, and motorcycles; all of them stripped and scavenged for parts. Nothing looked whole, and all of it looked old.

“What is it?” asked Nix, leaning past him to look.

“Junk,” he said.

“Where’s all the other stuff?” she asked. “I thought they were rebuilding.”

“More like dismantling.”

They hurried to catch up to the others, but paused again at the second hangar. This one had a row of quads painted in military camouflage. There were big worktables, chain hoists from which unidentifiable engine parts hung, tool chests on rollers, and machine schematics taped to the walls. But again there was a flavor of disuse about it all. Like the work of repairing the machines had been abandoned. Weeks or even months ago.

“Where are all the soldiers?” asked Nix. “And the technicians? The monks said that there are more than two hundred people over here. We’ve seen maybe ten different soldiers and Captain Ledger. And three or four different voices in the interview air lock.”

“I don’t know, but it’s creeping me out,” Benny admitted. Nix nodded, but she looked more than creeped out. She looked deeply hurt by it.

“Let’s go,” he said, and they hurried off.

Joe and Grimm stopped at the entrance to the third hangar. The smaller door was open, but he stood in front of it.

“I know you kids have about a million questions about what’s going on over here,” he began.

“Maybe two million,” said Riot, “and that’s just me. Red over yonder’s been writing questions in that journal of hers, and she’s got every page filled, front and back.”

Nix nodded.

“I have a few hundred thousand just off the top of my head,” said Benny. “Any chance we’re actually going to get some answers?”

“There’s a lot going on that you don’t know about,” said Joe, “and a lot of it is classified.”

“Why?” asked Lilah sharply.

“Because the military likes to keep its business to itself.”

“Why?”

Joe smiled. “Because secrecy can become an addiction. That’s been a problem as long as people have tried to covet power for themselves. Sure, governments need to keep some secrets, but too often the people inside the government create for themselves the illusion that because they know things nobody else does, it makes them more powerful. That kind of thinking creates a kind of contempt for anyone on the outside. It’s born from a belief that their own power will diminish in direct proportion to the transparency of their actions. So secrets become the currency that buys them membership into a club so exclusive that their agendas are never shared, and the value of what they hold is measured only from a first-person perspective.” He paused. “Are you following me on this?”

“Yes,” said Benny.

“There’s more, though,” said Joe. “Greed and a feeling of inadequacy aren’t the only reasons people keep secrets. Sometimes they hide things — information, the truth, themselves — behind layers of secrecy simply because they’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” asked Lilah.

“You,” said Joe. “Everyone who held any kind of power, everyone who kept any secrets, everyone who was part of running the world before First Night is terrified of you kids.”

“Why us?” asked Nix.

“Not just you four — but your whole generation. You scare them to death.”

“But… why?” asked Benny.

“Three reasons,” said Joe, ticking them off on his fingers. “Because you want to know the truth. Because you’ll eventually learn the truth. And because you deserve to know the truth.”

Benny looked past him at the open door. “What truth, Joe?”

The ranger said nothing.

“The Reaper Plague,” Benny said softly. “There are all kinds of theories about how it started. A new virus…”

“Radiation from a returning space probe,” said Nix.

“The wrath of God,” added Riot.

“Something that was accidentally released from a lab,” said Lilah.

Benny closed his eyes. “None of that’s true, is it?”

When he opened his eyes, he saw a look of such deep sadness on Joe’s face that it made his heart hurt.

“Before First Night,” said the ranger, “I spent my entire adult life working for a government organization that did only one thing: We hunted down the kinds of people who wanted to see the world burn. Terrorists, religious extremists, actual mad scientists, governments that had gone off the rails. Time and time again I led good men and women into battle to stop the release of a doomsday weapon. I won every single time. I lost a lot of friends along the way. I even lost the first woman I truly loved. My body’s covered with scars from injuries taken in the line of duty. Me and my guys, we were sometimes all that stood between the world and the end of everything. Sounds grandiose, right? But that’s how it was.” He sighed.

“You failed,” said Lilah. She made a statement of it, harsh and naked.

He raised his hands as if indicating the whole world. “Some people kept their secrets a little too long and a little too well, and by the time my team knew about it, the devil was already off the leash.” He shook his head. “That’s not an apology, and it’s not an excuse. I want us to understand each other. I’m a ranger. I do not work for the American Nation. I work with them. There are some good people helping to build a new government. But there are some people who still hold on to the old ways. Their religion is the cult of secrecy, and they are every bit as dangerous as Saint John and the psychopaths running the Night Church.”

“Why tell us all this now?” asked Benny. “What aren’t you telling us?”

“Benny,” cautioned Nix, but Joe shook his head.

“He’s dead right, honey. When we go into that hangar, you’re stepping outside of the world you knew and into a bad slice of the old world. They’re going to want to push you around. They’re going to try and close you out of their vault of secrets. You’re civilians and you’re kids and they believe that you don’t matter.”

Joe removed the slips of paper they’d gotten from Sergeant Ortega. “This is a different kind of currency, and down on the level of reality and sense, it’s worth a lot more than the secrets the people on this base are holding.”

He handed them to Benny.

“I told them that you had information about where Dr. McReady might be. They want that information very badly. They think that it’s your obligation to simply hand it over. If you do, they’ll kick you right back onto the other side of the trench. Don’t let them. This is your world. It was always yours. We didn’t have the right to break it, and we shouldn’t be allowed to keep any more secrets.”

The four of them stood there in front of Joe Ledger, weighing his words, reading the implications. Grimm licked his jowls and watched them.

Finally Benny said, “The Reaper Plague was no accident, was it?”

“No,” said Joe in a ghost of a voice. “We made the monster and we let it out of its cage.”

“Deliberately?” asked Nix, aghast.

His eyes were filled with great sorrow. “You ever heard of Friedrich Nietzsche?”

Nix nodded and in a small voice said, “I was just thinking about that earlier. ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ ”

“Exactly,” said Joe. “We stared into the abyss so long we liked what we saw. God forgive us all.”

CHAPTER 58

Joe turned and walked into the hangar. Grimm was right at his heels. Riot and Lilah exchanged a glance, then followed. Benny paused, touching Nix’s arm. He didn’t like the wild look in her eyes.

“You okay?”

“Oh, sure,” she said tightly. “I’m just fine. I shouldn’t even be surprised. After everything that’s gone on with Charlie and the Hammer, Preacher Jack, Mother Rose, Saint John… I don’t know why I don’t just give up on believing in people.”

“I know why,” said Benny.

She gave him a long, cold look. “Oh really? Why?”

“Because we’re people. Your mom was a good person who never hurt anyone. Tom died trying to help people. That guy George who spent all those years taking care of Lilah and her sister. The Greenman. Guys like Solomon Jones and Sally Two-Knives and everyone who helped destroy Gameland… they’re people. Eve is a person. So is Riot, and she was raised to be a monster. She left all that behind, and for the last few years she’s done nothing but risk her life to help people. They’re good people, and that’s what I believe in, Nix. That goodness exists and that it’s powerful. And I think that’s what you believe in too.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against his chest. “But there are so many of them. Look at what they’ve done. They destroyed the whole world….”

“No,” Benny said softly. He hooked a finger under her chin and gently raised her face. “Not the whole world. And not the best of it.”

Nix’s mouth trembled and she hung there at the edge of tears, pinned to the moment by the enormity of Joe’s words.

“I can’t live in a world like this,” she said. “I can’t live if everything’s broken and there’s only pain.”

“No,” agreed Benny, “neither can I. So let’s live in a better world than that.”

She suddenly wrapped her arms around him, and they clung to each other.

“Promise me,” she begged.

“I promise,” he said.

As he held her, Benny looked into that promise. It was a simple enough thing to say in the heat of heartbreak and tears. But he knew as he said it that this was going to mean more to him than anything else. Something shifted inside his head and his heart, like a switch being thrown on some machinery that had been carefully built but never turned on. He wasn’t sure, then or ever, what powered that machinery. Maybe love, maybe hate, maybe a moral outrage so hot that it caused gears to turn and motors to combust.

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever. It was a moment in which the words he said aloud and the whispers of his inner voice spoke in perfect harmony. And Benny knew thereafter that he would never hear that inner voice as a thing separate from himself. It was as if he had caught up to the idealized version of himself that had always walked a pace or two ahead.

I promise, was what he said.

I will, was what he meant.

CHAPTER 59

They entered the hangar, which was vast but mostly empty. Two big, black helicopters squatted on the concrete pad. Unlike the ones in the first hangar, these hadn’t been stripped of parts. They looked fierce and sinister and ready to growl their way into the air. Benny had read about helicopters and thought they might be Black Hawks, though this one had stubby wings as well as rotors, and he was pretty sure that some of the stuff mounted on those wings were chain guns and missiles. Part of him thought that they were pretty cool; but the other aspect of him — the facet of his personality that had just shifted into the forefront of his mind — viewed them merely as a tool. Potentially useful, but in no way designed for anything but destruction. Even if that destruction was necessary.

He thought about the phrase “necessary evil” and believed he understood it better at that moment than ever before. It was like the sword he carried. And that sparked a memory of something Tom once told him, an old samurai maxim that describes the apparent contradiction of those who prepare for war but do not crave it.

“We train ten thousand hours to prepare for a single moment we pray never happens.”

Benny nodded to himself.

Most of the hangar was in shadows. One corner was well lit, though, and it was occupied by a big metal folding table. A woman in a military uniform sat at the table, and she rose as Joe led them over.

“Kids, meet Colonel Reid,” said Joe. “She’s the base commander here at Sanctuary.”

Colonel Reid was a stern, unattractive woman roughly the size and density of a packing crate. She had iron-gray hair cut short, a lipless slash of a mouth that was compressed into a line of stern disapproval, and eyes that had all the warmth of frozen blueberries.

Despite his immediate reaction to her, Benny wanted to get this started on the right foot. He smiled and extended his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. My name’s—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Imura,” she said, cutting him off sharply. She eyed the four of them with the disapproval of a disgruntled diner looking at side dishes she hadn’t ordered. “I know who all of you are.”

Joe sighed.

Benny’s hand hung for a moment in the air.

“Okay, taking it back,” he said, lowering his arm.

Reid eyed Joe. “What’s your new mission status? Child-care professional?”

Joe sliced off a wafer of a smile. “They earned their spot.”

Reid shook her head. “It’s on you, then. I don’t have troops to waste minding them.”

“We didn’t ask to be minded,” said Benny.

“Right,” said Nix, “I heard that four of your guys were in the infirmary.”

Reid’s icy expression dropped to absolute zero. “You have a smart mouth, girl.”

“And you have a—”

“Okay, enough!” roared Benny. “Everyone cut the crap.”

They all looked at him, momentarily shocked to silence.

“What the hell is it with everyone?” Benny continued, his volume lower but his voice still hard as fists. “If you’re mad at us for roughing up some of your soldiers, then too bad. Get over it. They could have acted like human beings instead of robots.”

“They were following my orders.”

“Then maybe you should start giving better orders,” Benny said coldly. “I mean, who do you think you are? Who do you think we are? We’re not on opposite sides in this thing. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s us against them, and the ‘them’ are the reapers and the zoms. We are supposed to be working together to save the world.”

“We are,” Reid fired back. “The American Nation is using its full resources to combat the Reaper Plague.”

Benny leaned on the edge of the table. “And me and my friends? We’re what to you? A nuisance?”

“I believe you already tried to play the card of importance due to finding the plane.”

Benny smiled. “Yeah, I thought I recognized your voice. That was you I talked to yesterday. You said that our finding the plane was only self-interest. Are you actually that dense? Are all you people that close-minded? We shared that information because that’s what people do. That’s how everyone survives. Maybe you haven’t been outside lately, colonel, but zombies ate the world. People have been scratching and clawing to survive for fifteen years. My own town is in California. Your jet passed right over us. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t see it? Are you going to tell me that you don’t know about the Nine Towns we have up in those mountains? Captain Ledger knows about them, so I’ll bet a brand-new ration dollar that you know about them.”

“We are aware of those towns,” conceded Colonel Reid. “What of it?”

“What of it?” Benny slapped the flat of his palm on the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Echoes banged off the hangar walls. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us? We thought we were alone all those years. We thought that the rest of the world was dead. Don’t you think it would have helped us to know that there were other people out there? That there was a new government? That scientists were working on a cure? That people were trying to put the world back together into some shape that made sense? Are you so removed from human emotions that you can’t realize how much that would have helped people? Helped us? It would have given us hope.”

Colonel Reid started to reply, but Benny wasn’t finished with her. “I read enough about the way things were before First Night to know that people were always fighting. Not just wars, but political fights, social fights, all sorts of things. I swear, sometimes reading those history books I wondered if people wanted to fight more than they wanted to survive.” He straightened and fixed her with a cold stare. “When we saw that jet, we thought that things were going to be okay. We thought that it represented a chance for a better future than the one we were handed. I can’t even put into words how sorry I am — how cheated I feel — to find out that things are just the same.”

The silence in the hangar was absolute.

Finally, Riot murmured, “The boy’s right… we’re up to our eyeballs in the alligator swamp and y’all won’t let us in the boat.”

Colonel Reid brushed nonexistent lint from her lapel. Nix balled her hands into little fists that she squeezed hard enough to make the knuckles creak.

In a calmer voice, Benny said, “Right now you need us.”

He produced the sheets with the coordinates.

Reid’s face went scarlet, and she wheeled on Ledger. “You said that you had the coordinates.”

“I did,” admitted Ledger. “And I gave them back to Benny. After all, he found them.”

“That’s treason. I could have you shot for this.”

Joe smiled. “You could try, Jane. But I don’t think that would work out for you as well as you’d like.” He shook his head. “Besides, those papers belong to Benny.”

“They are the property of the American Nation.”

“Excuse me,” cut in Nix, “but exactly where are the borders of the American Nation?”

“Is that a joke?” demanded Reid.

“No, it’s a straight question. We found those papers out here in the Ruin. Benny took some off a reaper and the coordinates from a walker. Are you saying that that happened inside your legal boundaries?”

“The whole continent is the American Nation.”

“From the Atlantic to the Pacific?”

“Of course.”

“So — central California is part of that, right?”

Reid snapped her mouth shut, but it was too late. Her foot was in Nix’s bear trap.

“You’re saying that our town, Mountainside, and all the other towns in the Sierra Nevadas are part of the American Nation?”

Reid kept her mouth clamped shut, but her face darkened by at least two shades. Benny wanted to laugh, but he kept his own mouth shut.

“You admit that our towns are part of your new nation, and yet never once did you send anyone to us. What were we? Inconvenient? Too much trouble? Did you just write us off?”

When Reid didn’t answer, Lilah gave a derisive snort. So far it was her only contribution to the conversation, but it was eloquent.

Finally Reid couldn’t hold it back anymore. “You arrogant little snots. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’ve dedicated my entire life to protecting this country.”

“Really?” asked Benny. “How much of that time was spent protecting the people?”

Reid shook her head. “You’re not capable of understanding what it takes to protect a nation.”

“I am,” said Joe quietly. “And the kid asks a good question. My rangers put together maps of all the populated settlements. I was in Asheville three times over the last two years to request permission to establish connections and resources to provide technology recovery services, medicines, and communication equipment. People like you argued against it every time. It wasn’t the best use of resources. The distances were too great. The indigenous populations of those settlements did not include a high enough percentage of scientists and researchers. Lots of excuses, none of them worth a drop of moose spit.”

“It’s not in your pay grade to question policy, Captain.”

“It’s not in anyone’s pay grade to devalue tens of thousands of human lives because protecting them is inconvenient. I can’t begin to tell you how deeply ashamed I am for not taking matters into my own hands. I should have told this boy’s brother about the American Nation. I should have told everyone. I should never have followed orders about leaving it to my superiors. Never. They deserve to know.”

“They would have been contacted at the appropriate time. There’s a timetable for this.”

“Contacted when?” asked Nix. “After we were all dead? After the reapers or the zoms slaughtered us? When exactly would the ‘appropriate’ time be?”

“This conversation is ridiculous,” Reid said with a dismissive shake of her head. “You’ll hand over those coordinates so I can assign a team to—”

“No,” said Benny.

“Don’t test me, boy.”

“The answer’s no. You don’t get them.”

Reid laid her hand on the pistol holstered at her hip. “You want to play games, boy? Do you want me to take them from you?”

Nix and Lilah drew their pistols as fast as lightning. Riot, however, very casually took her slingshot from her belt and socketed a ball bearing into the pouch. Joe Ledger folded his arms and leaned a hip against the table.

Benny did nothing except give Reid a small, cold smile. “Like Captain Ledger said — you can try.”

But Reid was not easily flustered. “Captain Ledger, I order you to—”

“Colonel Reid, I hereby resign my commission in the army of the American Nation, yielding all rank, pay, benefits, and privileges effective as of right now.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Just did. In fact, a long time ago Tom Imura offered to let me sleep on his couch and help set me up as a bounty hunter in Mountainside. So I’m retroactively taking his offer, which means that I am declaring myself a citizen of Mountainside, one of the Nine Towns of the Sierra Nevadas. You can’t tell by hearing it, but I’m capitalizing Nine Towns. If no one else has declared them a sovereign nation, then I am.”

“You—”

“Unless,” Joe said, “you would like to formally accept those towns into the American Nation, extending to the citizens the full support and resources of the American Nation.”

Before Reid could answer, Joe stepped forward. His smile was strange, Benny thought. Feral, like a wolf’s. It was almost as if a different person — more savage and more intense — glowered out through his blue eyes.

“Listen to me, Jane, and you’ll do yourself a lot of good by keeping your ears open and your mouth shut,” he said, his voice as soft as a whisper. “I’ve fought for my country and I’ve fought for my world. You sat behind a desk. You haven’t logged an hour of field time in thirty years. You don’t understand what it was that built this country in the first place. You take a lot of pride in being an officer in the ‘American’ Nation. So do I, but that rank and uniform comes with a price — no, an obligation — to protect the people as well as the real estate. Some of our colleagues didn’t always grasp that before the Fall. Some did, a lot didn’t. Those were the boneheads who thought it was a smart idea to nuke the cities rather than try to protect the survivors and retake the land. Those were the ones who used ‘assets’ and ‘collateral damage’ to describe people and loss of life. Well, guess what… that ends right here and right now. America was born in the fires of a revolution, with people who wanted to push back against oppression. It was made tougher in the furnace of a civil war to make everyone free. In every single decade there were people who stood up and spoke out, people who made a stand. I look at you and what you represent, and I look at these four kids here and all their integrity and potential, and sister, you don’t measure up too well.”

“You’re a hypocrite,” said Reid.

“I know it. But that was five minutes ago. Miracle of miracles, I have officially come to my senses. Now how about that? And from now on I’ll do whatever I can, whatever I need to do, to atone for being a pigheaded jackass and a company man for way too long.” He took a small step closer. “Oh yeah, and theft. I’m going to steal one of those helicopters so I can try and find Dr. McReady.”

Benny nodded to Nix and the others, and they lowered their weapons.

“You don’t want to do this, Captain,” said Reid.

He stepped back and shrugged. “I’m not a captain anymore.”

Joe walked over to the helicopter, entered it, and did something that caused the big motor to whine to life. Then he climbed out, crossed to the wall near the door they’d entered, and pressed a big red button. Immediately the massive hangar doors began rolling sideways, letting the hot afternoon air spill in, bringing with it the stink of zombie flesh.

While Joe did all this, Colonel Reid stood exactly where she was. She said nothing and did nothing.

The ranger came back to the table. “Once we’re airborne,” he said, “we’ll radio you with the coordinates. Just in case. Maybe once you see where we’re going, you’ll understand.”

Reid’s face was wooden.

Joe paused. “I know what you’re dealing with, Jane. And you know that I’m doing the right thing.”

Her lips curled slowly back to reveal small, hard teeth. “I hope you die out there,” she snarled.

Joe sighed and walked away. Benny felt sad. That was exactly what Morgie Mitchell had said to him before they’d left him behind in Mountainside. Even now Benny didn’t think the colonel meant those words, any more than Morgie had. Sometimes you can be so hurt, so sad, and so confused that the only words you can force out are hateful ones.

Benny started to turn, but paused as Lilah pointed a finger at Reid. “Take care of Chong.”

“Louis Chong is a patient in this facility,” said Reid. “Don’t insult me.”

Lilah shook her head. “It’s not an insult. It’s a threat. I thought that was clear.”

She turned and walked toward the helicopter.

It occurred to Benny that this had all been going on a long time without any of Reid’s soldiers interfering. That didn’t seem right.

“Colonel?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral. “Where are the soldiers? Where’s everyone else?”

He expected a sharp answer or at least some sarcastic remark. Instead he saw sadness flood into her eyes. Her shoulders sagged for a moment, as if some tremendous weight pressed down on them.

But she did not answer Benny’s question.

CHAPTER 60

They climbed into the helicopter, and Joe buckled everyone into a seat. Grimm threw himself onto the deck with a loud clank of armor. Only Riot remained standing.

“You need to buckle up, girl,” said Joe.

But she shook her head. “I ain’t going. I don’t like to leave Eve here alone. Little bird’s been hurting something bad, and I want to keep an eye on her.”

No one could argue with that. Lilah did something that surprised Benny. The stern, detached Lost Girl reached over and took Riot’s hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. For a fierce moment Riot clutched that hand like it was a lifeline. Lilah bent and kissed Riot’s hand. There was no romance in it, just a connection on a wordless, human level. A conversation through action rather than words.

It stirred Benny’s heart. Since Chong got sick, Lilah had become almost a nonperson. Cold, incredibly remote, and harsh. Could she be thawing? Or was Eve too powerful a reminder of Annie?

Benny said, “Give Evie a kiss from me.”

Riot gave him a sad little smile. “She liked those balloons.”

“It was nice to see her smile.”

That changed Riot’s expression, but she turned away to hide whatever was in her eyes. At the door she paused.

“Y’all come back safe and sound, hear?”

Then she stepped outside, and they could hear her crunching steps as she ran back to the bridge.

“Balloons?” asked Joe.

Benny explained about the pack of brightly colored balloons he’d found in the reaper’s quad. “Can’t figure why he’d have them, though.”

“Everyone’s a scavenger these days,” observed Joe. “Maybe he knew some kids and thought they might like them.”

That thought didn’t make Benny feel any better. Kids waiting for the reaper to return with a present for them.

He sighed and busied himself with trying to adjust the straps. Seats requiring buckles were as far outside Benny’s experience as helicopters were. However, he couldn’t tell if the hammering of his heart was because of the thought of actually flying—particularly in a machine that was as extinct to his experience as the dinosaurs — or because of the confrontation he’d just had with Colonel Reid. He suspected that it was both in roughly equal measures.

Nix sat next to him, her small hand in his, fingers entwined, skin icy cold. Lilah sat across from him, and her thoughts were clearly directed inward. Shutters had dropped behind her eyes.

Joe slid the door shut, squatted down, and shouted over the whine of the engine. “We used to have an expression: ‘This just got real.’ Well, that’s where we are. We’re stealing government equipment, and we have no friends here at Sanctuary except a bunch of monks.”

“Is that meant as a pep talk?” asked Benny.

“Just stating the facts.”

“Thanks,” said Nix, “but I’m pretty sure we’re already scared enough as it is.”

Joe grinned.

“Do we even know where we’re going?”

“We do.” Joe removed a big map from his pocket and spread it out on the floor and tapped a spot with a forefinger. “Right here.”

Nix leaned in and read the words printed on the map. “Death Valley National Park. Oh, isn’t that wonderful.”

“ ‘Death’ Valley?” asked Benny. “Seriously? Death Valley?”

“That’s the DVNP on the note we found,” observed Nix. “It fits.”

“I get that, but really… Death Valley?”

“I think we all appreciate the irony,” said Nix.

“Not sure you do,” said Benny. He reached out with the toe of his shoe and tapped another spot. “Does that actually say the ‘Funeral Mountains’?”

“Don’t let it spook you, kid,” said Joe. “Those names were given long before the dead rose.”

“That’s actually not a comfort,” said Benny, and Nix nodded agreement.

“We’re heading to a spot called Zabriskie Point on the eastern side of Death Valley, south of Furnace Creek. It’s in the badlands….”

“Oh, ‘badlands.’ Also very comforting.”

Joe said, “Look, if we pool all of what we know, we come up with a picture that’s a little grim and a little hopeful. I think we can safely deduce that Dr. McReady was not on the C-130 when it crashed. It seems clear that the plane stopped at the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon, where I believe Doc McReady and Field Team Five deplaned and took alternate transport to Death Valley.”

“Why did Dr. McReady stop at the base in Oregon?” asked Lilah. “What’s there?”

“Ah, well,” said Joe diffidently. “One of our dirty little secrets. Even though that base had been officially decommissioned, it was actually still in operation at the time of the outbreak.”

“You mean there were still chemical weapons there?” Benny asked.

“Were,” agreed Joe, “and are. Chemical and biological weapons, agents, compounds, and ingredients. It was all stockpiled there. The decommissioning process was a smoke screen. The government was making a show of complying with the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control agreement that outlawed the production, stockpiling, and use of all chemical weapons. The international agreement was administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons based in the Netherlands.”

“But we kept the weapons?”

Joe looked pained. “There are a lot of skeletons in the closet, kids.”

“Okay, so why would Dr. McReady stop there?” insisted Nix.

“Because there is a lot of crucial equipment there,” said Joe. “Stuff the American Nation can’t manufacture yet. Stuff like hazmat suits, biohazard containment gear, pretty much everything McReady might need if she was going to collect field samples of a mutating pathogen. And there were planes there too. It’s possible that one of them — a prop job, not a jet — could have been repaired. Or maybe that had already been done and McReady got wind of it. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that she stopped there, got some alternate transport, and as far as we know she’s still alive somewhere.”

“In Death Valley,” said Benny.

“Possibly.”

Nix said, “Death Valley isn’t that far, is it?”

“Hundred miles and change,” said Joe.

“And the doc went missing a year ago?”

Joe nodded. “Closer to eighteen months. We’ve been looking, but the country’s too big. And we don’t have enough resources.”

“If she’s still alive,” said Nix, “she can’t be trying all that hard to get home. She could have walked it half a dozen times by now.”

Joe winced, but gave another nod. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But we still have to try and find her. Now sit back and enjoy the ride. None of you have flown before, right? Well — you’re going to love this, I guarantee it.”

They did not.

Lilah was the only one who didn’t throw up.

CHAPTER 61

The motion of the helicopter changed, and Joe called them all to join him. Green-faced, sweating, nauseous beyond imagining, Benny and the others unbuckled and staggered forward to crowd through into the tiny cockpit. Joe chased Grimm out of the copilot seat so Nix could sit there, and the mastiff sulked his way back into the main cabin. Benny and Lilah jammed the doorway.

“Welcome to the badlands of Death Valley,” said Joe as if he was happy about it. “Zabriskie Point is dead ahead.”

Below them was a landscape that Benny thought looked like the surface of some alien world. Stretches of barren ridges, wind-sculpted badlands, deep hollows cut into the terrain by millions of years of erosion, and the black mouths of caves carved by wind into the sides of grim mountains. Here and there were desperate splashes of color from hardy trees and shrubs that even this hostile wasteland could not kill.

“This makes Nevada look like a rain forest,” observed Nix. “Guess the name isn’t ironic.”

“And there’s not much out here. California State Route 190 cuts through this area, but that was mostly used by people who wanted to get through this territory as quickly as possible,” said Joe. “No towns, almost no animals, no—”

“Whoa,” said Benny suddenly, “what’s that?”

Joe looked where he was pointing, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. “Well, well, well… Isn’t that interesting as all hell?”

Half a mile ahead there was an unnaturally flat shelf of rock set among the higher reaches of the rippled sedimentary rock. As Joe steered the helicopter toward it, they could see that it was paved with concrete. The surface was cracked and overgrown by some determined but leafless creeper vines. A symbol was painted on the shelf. A big circle with a capital letter H had long ago been painted in the center.

“That’s a helipad,” said Joe. “A landing pad for helicopters.”

“I thought you said there was nothing out here,” said Nix.

“I did.”

Benny nodded to the helipad. “So… what on earth is that doing out here?”

“Guess we’re going to find out.”

They rounded the end of a wall of eroded rock and hovered a hundred feet above the shelf. There were foot trails running down into the badlands, but no visible road and no buildings or structures.

“Weird,” said Benny.

Joe consulted his instruments. “That helipad is dead center of the coordinates. This is definitely where McReady’s team was headed.”

“You said they probably took a small plane here,” said Nix. “Could a plane have landed on that?”

“No. Only another helicopter…” Joe’s words trailed off. As they continued to swing around, they could see down the slope on the far side. It was a sharp drop of hundreds of feet. Halfway down, smashed in among spikes of jagged rock, was the wreckage of another helicopter. Most of the wreckage was twisted into meaningless shapes, but as if to mock them, a flat section of the hull lay on a smaller shelf in plain view. And painted on the side, faded by a year and a half of harsh sun and wind, was the flag of the American Nation.

“Oh God,” gasped Nix.

Benny said, “No one could have lived through that.”

“It’s a wreck,” said Joe, “but let’s not read too much into it yet. We don’t know if it crashed when they got here or sometime later. Those crags are inaccessible. If anyone died in that thing, their zoms would probably still be trapped there.”

Nothing moved, however.

Joe brought the helicopter back up to the level of the helipad. The rear wall of the shelf was flat, but there was a ring of cracked boulders around the shelf, some as big as two-story houses.

“What’s that?” asked Lilah, pointing to the rear corner of the shelf.

A smile appeared slowly on Joe’s face. As he drifted closer, they could all see it. The object was eight feet high and five feet wide, and though it was caked with dust and clots of dirt, it was clearly made from solid steel.

“An air lock,” breathed Benny.

“An air lock,” agreed Joe.

Nix turned a suspicious eye on him. “That’s just like the one at Sanctuary. Is there another lab hidden in there? Did you know about this?”

He shook his head. “If so, then it’s news to me.”

“More secrets?” asked Benny.

“Too many secrets,” Joe said with a slow nod. “Too damn many secrets.”

“Is Dr. McReady in there?” asked Lilah.

No one answered. The door looked like it hadn’t been opened in years.

“Well… on the upside,” said Benny, “at least there aren’t any zoms.”

But once again the day seemed to want to mock them. A figure stepped from the shadows of a tall, rocky cliff and glowered up at the helicopter. Another joined it. And another. They moved out of the cave mouths and crawled from under the branches of large shrubs until at least a dozen of them stood in a cluster, hands reaching upward to the noise of the rotors.

“That,” said Joe, “is not good.”

Some of the zoms were dressed in the rags of what had once been military uniforms. One wore a bloodstained lab coat. A few wore black clothes with red tassels and white wings painted on their chests. Only three of the zoms were dressed in ordinary clothes.

“This is really not good,” Joe muttered.

Nix pointed to the zom in the white lab coat. The distance was too great to see the creature’s face, but the thing was clearly a woman.

“Oh no… is that Dr. McReady?”

Joe worked the joystick to bring the helicopter down, which made the engine whine increase. The zoms clawed at the sky as if they could tear the machine down and crack it open to get at the sweet meat inside. The ranger leveled off and hovered, then took a pair of binoculars from a holster beside his chair and peered through them. They all watched him, seeing the muscles locked in tension beneath his clothes. After a full minute, that tension eased by a few strained degrees.

“No… that’s Dr. Jones. Merry, I think her name was.”

Merry, thought Benny. What a sad name for a creature that would spend eternity down there, perpetually hungry, lingering in dried flesh long past the point where life had any meaning.

Joe handed the glasses to Nix and nodded toward where the Teambook was tucked under the dashboard. At his direction she found the page for Dr. Merry Jones and confirmed the identity of the zom in the lab coat. Then she flipped through the other pages and identified three of the soldiers — Engebreth, Hollingsworth, and Carr. The others were reapers. She began to close the book when Lilah stopped her.

“Go back,” she said urgently, and as Nix fanned back through the pages, Lilah thrust a hand out and stabbed one photo with her finger. “There.”

It was the page for Sergeant Louisa Crisp.

“What about her?” asked Joe.

“There, she’s down by that tall rock,” said Lilah. “See her?”

“That girl’s a reaper,” began Nix, but Benny cut her off.

“No… look at her.”

They did, their eyes flicking back and forth between the reaper who stood at the edge of the pack and the face of the staff sergeant in the Teambook. The thick black hair was gone, but the woman had a very distinct Native American face. She looked a lot like Deputy Gorman from the town watch, who was full-blooded Navajo.

“That’s her,” Lilah said with certainty.

“Damn,” breathed Joe. “Louisa Crisp was the squad leader for Field Team Five. It was her job to protect the science team.”

Nix shook her head. “But she became a reaper. Why?”

Joe didn’t answer that. His finger rested lightly on a plastic trigger mounted on the control joystick. “Listen to me,” he said. “We have to set down and try to get through that air lock. That’s going to take time, and it’s going to leave us exposed. We have two choices. We trust to cadaverine and hope that it works on them. Smells don’t travel as well in air this dry.”

“Or…?” asked Benny with a sinking heart. He knew where this was going.

“Or we eliminate the threat here and now.”

“God,” breathed Nix. “We can’t just kill them. They’re victims….”

“We all know what they are, Nix,” said Lilah. “But I don’t see any real choice.”

But something else was bothering Benny, something beyond the ethical dilemma. “Wait a sec,” he said. “Joe, can this thing get closer to the ground? I mean, can you like… skim just above the ground from one side of the clearing to the other? Maybe get almost to the ground near them and then sort of — I don’t know what to call it—drift away from them. Not up, but across the ground. Can you do that?”

The ranger started to ask why, then smiled and nodded, getting Benny’s meaning. “Let’s give that a try.”

Joe lowered the helicopter so that the wheels bumped against the rocky ground ten yards from the cluster of zoms. The zoms instantly broke into a flat-out run, screaming like demons, hands tearing the air as they swarmed forward. Joe didn’t bother to drift backward and instead rose to fifty feet and hovered.

The truth was obvious.

They were all R3’s. Every last one.

Joe slowly turned the Black Hawk to face the zoms, who had now stopped below the machine. Some of them tried jumping up to catch the helicopter, even though it was too far above them. The ranger curled his finger around the trigger.

“You kids go back,” he suggested. “You don’t want to see this.”

“No,” said Benny, “we don’t.”

“Who would?” asked Lilah.

Nix spoke some words very softly. It was a prayer they’d heard twice the day before they’d left town. First in one cemetery as the Houser family was buried, then in another cemetery as Zak Matthias, Charlie Pink-eye’s nephew, was put into the cold ground.

A prayer for the dead.

In the cabin behind them, Grimm tilted his big head and bayed like a hound from some old-time horror novel.

As Joe opened fire with the thirty-millimeter chain guns, Benny thought he heard the big ranger murmur a single word.

“Amen.”

CHAPTER 62

The big Black Hawk hovered above the scene of carnage. Where a minute ago there had been a cluster of R3 zoms, the fastest and most dangerous kind, now there was torn meat and broken bones. The chain guns had literally torn the dead apart.

“God almighty,” breathed Nix.

Joe’s face was set and grim as he put the machine down on the center of the helipad. The whirling blades threshed the gun smoke and scattered it to the dry desert wind, and blew most of the body parts over the edge. He cut the engine.

“Okay,” Joe said, “gear up.”

Lockers in the back of the helicopter were filled with protective clothing. Thin leather jackets covered with wire mesh and metal washers, arm and leg pads, and gauntlets for their hands. Helmets, too, with wire grilles. All the joints were flexible and the stuff was surprisingly lightweight. Joe showed them a special feature.

“Will this take long?” Benny asked. “Brother Peter said we had until tomorrow night to—”

“Let’s worry about Brother Peter tomorrow,” said the ranger. “We’ve enough to do today.”

But Nix said, “Will he really attack Sanctuary?”

“He can try,” said Joe. He tapped the minigun that was mounted on tracks inside the door. “Knives and axes don’t stack up well against a rate of fire of six thousand rounds per minute.”

“Rockets, too,” said Lilah enthusiastically.

“Rockets, too.” Joe shook his head. “If Brother Peter shows up tomorrow, we’ll explain the facts of life to him.”

The ranger knelt down and buckled on the rest of Grimm’s armor. The dog’s helmet was set with daggerlike blades, and spikes sprouted all up and down the mastiff’s powerful body.

“Note to self,” murmured Benny, “don’t hug the puppy.”

Grimm agreed with a big wet glupp.

Lilah dropped the magazine of her Sig Sauer, checked the rounds, and slapped it in place. Joe did the same. Nix, too.

“Benny,” called Joe, “you want a handgun?”

“No thanks. I’m not a very good shot.”

In truth Benny didn’t like guns. Tom had been shot to death. Benny had no moral objection to Nix and the others having them; no, his decision was entirely personal. He was afraid that if he carried one, then he would be tempted to use it too often, to use it to solve problems rather than finding other solutions. That view was entirely his own, and he never shared it with Nix or tried to convince anyone that it was the only viewpoint or even the best. It was his decision.

His sword? That was different. Perhaps it was the old belief that a samurai’s soul lives inside the steel of the sword that cast that weapon into a different aspect in his mind. This sword had once been Tom’s; now it was his. The sword was a close-range weapon; it required great skill. And despite the grim purpose for which it was created, there was an elegance and beauty about it.

They clustered by the door.

“This is how we’re going to do it,” said Joe. “I lead, you follow. Everybody keeps their eyes open. Keep chatter to a minimum. If anything happens or if we get separated, head back here to the chopper. There are enough supplies and weapons here for a couple of weeks. But let’s not need those supplies, okay? We stick together. We all go in, we all come out, no surprises, no drama. Got it?”

“Warrior smart,” said Lilah.

“Warrior smart,” they echoed. Even Joe.

He pulled the door open, and a blast of hot air blew into the cabin. Grimm leaped out first, his spiked armor clanking as he landed and immediately began sniffing the ground. Joe was next, and everyone else followed him out into blistering heat that made the desert around Sanctuary feel cool by comparison. Only Joe seemed unaffected by it.

“Not bad for May,” he said. “Probably no more than 110. I was here in July once and it was 134.”

Nix plucked at the fittings of her combat suit as she stepped down. “Couple of hours in this suit under that sun and we’ll be baked hams.”

“Baked hams are juicy,” observed Benny, dropping down next to her. “We’ll be more like beef jerky.”

The helipad was pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. Shell casings had rained down and gleamed amid the pieces of things that had once been zombies. There was no blood, but black muck was splashed everywhere. There was more of it than Benny had ever seen around a dead zom, and it seemed to ooze out of the torn tissue. When he bent to examine it, he saw tiny white specks, like pieces of thread, wriggling in the mess.

Grimm suddenly barked at Benny, and Joe wheeled around sharply. “Don’t touch that!”

“Not a chance,” said Benny, “but what is it? Looks like worms, but I’ve never seem worms in zoms before.”

They all clustered around. “They’ve always been there,” said the ranger. “At least the eggs have. In most zoms the larvae die off after laying eggs. They go dormant right around the time the zoms stop decaying. Some hatch, but they burrow deep into the nerve and brain tissue. They keep the zoms alive — or alive-ish — but don’t ask me how. Something about proteins they excrete.”

“Okay, eww,” said Benny.

“These aren’t eggs,” said Nix. “These are worms, just like in the zoms Lilah and I fought.”

“Exactly,” said Joe. “The R3’s, the fast zoms. The larvae are active in the fast zoms. In the wild boars, too. It’s part of the mutation the science team was studying.”

“Are they contagious?” asked Nix, shying back from them.

“Very,” said Joe. “Not too bad if you get some on your skin and wipe it off fast, but if you get it in a mucous membrane… eyes, nose, mouth, an open wound…”

He didn’t need to finish.

Benny had a horrible thought. If Chong was infected, then those eggs — or larvae — were in his body too. He wanted to scream. That was why the scientist had asked him if Chong had gotten any fluids on him. He kept his thoughts to himself. It would be abominably cruel to share this with Lilah, and he hoped she wasn’t already thinking those thoughts. He even avoided looking at her, for fear she’d read his mind.

They backed well clear of the black goo and followed Joe to the air lock. It was almost exactly like the one at Sanctuary, with a small glass-fronted box set into a recess beside the door. The hand-scan device — the geometry scanner — was dark, the glass cracked and filled with sand. Joe punched two buttons and placed his hand on the glass, but nothing happened. He used the butt of his pistol to knock out the glass in order to access the wires, but after fifteen minutes of connecting one wire to another he flipped them back into the recess with a disgusted grunt. Then he pounded on the door with the side of his fist.

Nothing happened.

“I thought you said that beating on the door doesn’t do any good,” observed Benny casually. “They can’t hear it inside.”

Joe shot him a venomous look. “Ever fall off the side of a helipad into a bunch of jagged rocks?”

“Point taken,” said Benny.

“Now what?” asked Nix. “Do we go looking for a back door?”

“No,” said Joe, turning to walk back to the Black Hawk, “now we try plan B.”

Once they were all inside the bird, Joe fired up the engine and lifted the helicopter into the air. It drifted backward from the air lock, past the edge of the drop-off.

“There’s an old military saying,” mused the ranger. “If at first you don’t succeed, call in an air strike.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Benny.

“It means, ‘Fire in the hole!’ ”

Joe flicked a switch on the cyclic grip and depressed a trigger. There was sound like steam escaping from a boiler, and then something shot away from under the stubby wing of the helicopter. Benny had only a hundredth of a second’s glimpse of something sleek and black, and then the entire front of the cliff seemed to bloom into a massive ball of orange fire. Chunks of stone and metal flew everywhere, but Joe was already rising into a fast climbing turn, and nothing hit the Black Hawk. The helicopter swung all the way around until it faced the cliff again. The fireball crawled up the side of the cliff, chased by smoke and hot wind. Then it thinned and fell apart into sparks. Joe angled the helicopter to use the rotor wash to whip away the smoke that clung to the helipad.

The six-ton air lock looked as if the fist of a giant had struck it. It lay on its back, driven nine feet inside the mountain. The spot where it had stood was a gaping maw almost big enough to drive a trade wagon through.

“Holy…,” began Benny, but had nowhere to go with that, so he repeated it. “Holy…”

Lilah smiled with a lupine delight.

“What was that?” gasped Nix.

“Hellfire missile,” said Joe.

Grimm gave a deep-chested whoof as if he approved.

Benny shook his head. When Joe had used the rocket launchers to defeat Mother Rose’s reapers, Benny had been unconscious, the victim of a blow to the head. He’d never witnessed anything like this. But from the expression on Nix’s face, he could tell that this “Hellfire” missile was far more devastating than the shoulder-mounted rockets. They’d read about weapons of war in school, but Benny had never really put much thought into their true destructive power. It was deeply disturbing.

Chunks of rock littered the helipad, but there was more than enough room to land.

Joe cut the engine.

“Okay, let’s try this again.”

CHAPTER 63

Morgie Mitchell sat on the top porch step of the empty Imura house. He’d already been inside. The floors were swept, fresh curtains were hung on the rods, and the creaking sixth step had been repaired. His sword lay near his left hip, a bottle of pop was slowly going warm next to his right.

Tomorrow was his first full day of training with Solomon Jones and the Freedom Riders. He had no idea what to expect. The people who rode with Jones were all famous; all of them were on the Zombie Cards. Morgie had gone through his stack and pulled the cards of the active Freedom Riders. He went through them over and over again, looking at their faces, trying to imagine what they’d be like in person.

Sally Two-Knives with her wild Mohawk hair and glittering bowie knives.

J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, who spoke in an old surfer slang that no one really understood.

Fluffy McTeague with his lipstick, diamond earrings, and pink carpet coat.

Sam “Basher” Bashman with his baseball bats.

Quick-Draw Carl, who still wore the broad-brimmed brown hat of his legendary dad, Sheriff Rick.

Bobby Tall Horse, an Apache who wore a Roman breastplate and horsehair helmet into battle.

The crazy woman, Dez Fox, who they said traveled with the mummified hand of her dead husband in her backpack.

And so many others.

Each of them was a hero; each of them was surrounded by mystery and tall tales.

He shook his head. Who was he to even think that he was worthy of training with them, let alone riding out with them?

Who did he think he was?

He turned and looked at the house.

Morgie collected all his cards and put them neatly into his pack. Then he picked up his sword and walked out into the yard to practice the drills Tom had taught him.

CHAPTER 64

Grimm ran ahead as they approached the shattered face of the cliff. The air lock was a twisted ruin. Beyond it was a wide chamber with metal walls and concrete floors. Soot streaked those walls now. Shattered light fixtures swung from the ceilings on webs of torn wiring.

They stepped carefully and silently inside. The entrance chamber split into two corridors.

“Should we split up?” asked Lilah. “I can—”

“Not a chance,” said Joe. “This isn’t a bad horror movie. We stay together and we watch each other’s backs. No one goes into the basement in a negligee to investigate a strange noise.”

Lilah looked at him as if he was deranged. “What?”

“Nothing. Old pop-culture reference whose expiration date has apparently passed. Sad.”

Benny thought he heard the Lost Girl mutter the word “idiot.”

They took the left-hand corridor first, for no other reason than because it was closer to where they stood. There were closed doors on one side of the corridor. Joe stopped in front of the first one and gently tried the knob. It turned easily. He glanced at Lilah, who took up a defensive position beside him, then turned the handle the rest of the way and kicked the door open.

It was a closet. Metal shelves filled with boxes of office supplies. No zoms, no people.

They moved to the second door and repeated the process.

And froze.

There was a person in the room.

Seated behind a big desk. A laptop computer was open on the desk. The office was decorated with big framed photographs of running brooks, snowy mountainsides, lush autumn forests. The man in the chair sat with his head — what there was of it — thrown back. A shotgun stood on its stock between his thighs. Even from the doorway Benny could read the scene. A person — either desperate or perhaps infected — sits down, props the shotgun on the edge of the chair, thumb on the trigger, barrel under the chin, and says good-bye to everything in the most final way possible.

The wall behind the desk, and part of the ceiling, was painted with chocolate brown that had once been bright red and moldy green that had once been gray brain matter.

All very disgusting, all very final. And a long time ago. Months, at the very least.

No reanimation.

What made it worse was what the man had written in black ink on his desk blotter:

There was no signature. There was no need for one.

They stood around the desk.

Nix looked from the writing to the body sprawled in the chair. “That poor man.”

Benny nodded. “What does it mean, though?”

“Watch the hall,” Joe said as he began quickly going through each drawer. He rummaged through the contents, tossing some things onto the floor, ignoring others. Then he found a sheaf of papers that made him stiffen and stare. He cursed softly.

“What is it?” asked Benny.

“I think I found out why Dr. McReady came to this facility.”

He showed the top page to Benny and the girls.

“What’s that mean?” asked Benny. “ ‘Biological Evaluation and Production’? Is this some kind of lab?”

Joe took the papers back and crumpled them up, his face a mask of disgust.

“This is a monster factory,” he said.

CHAPTER 65

Brother Peter watched as two of the Red Brothers carried Sister Sun up the slope. Every day the woman seemed to have aged ten years. The cancer that consumed her was a merciless and ravenous thing. It would take her soon. A few days, a week at the most.

In a way, Brother Peter envied her. She would be going into the darkness soon, and he was doomed to live until the work of the Night Church was completed.

The reapers set her down, and one of them produced a small folding stool and supported her as she sat down on it. Peter ordered one of them to fetch water and directed another to erect the portable awning.

They were in a cleft of rock that provided an excellent view of the chain-link fence, the airfield, the row of siren towers, and the hangars on both sides of the miles-long trench. However, from a reverse position, the reapers were invisible inside a bank of deep shadows.

A reaper came trotting into the cleft.

“Beloved of god,” he said to Sister Sun and Brother Peter, “we are ready.”

Brother Peter nodded. “Good. Has there been any sign of the helicopter?”

“No, my brother. I have ten scouts watching for it.”

“Very well.”

“The wind continues to veer,” said the reaper. “Sister Alice thinks it will shift two or three more points, but I ran the math a couple of times. We’re good to go now.”

Brother Peter nodded again. “Go down to the fence and wait for the net crews. Sister Sun will be giving the signal.”

The man bowed and left.

Sister Sun smiled at Brother Peter and reached for his hand and squeezed it with what little strength she had. “You’ll let me do that? That’s so kind of you, Peter.”

“This is your victory, sister.”

“I know that Saint John is so proud of you,” she said, “and you will be gathered in with loving arms when it is your time to go into the darkness.”

He bent and kissed the skeletal hand and pressed it to his cheek. On the other side of the desert, beyond the red rock mountains, the sun was beginning its long fall toward a fiery twilight. To both of them, the vital young man and the dying older woman, it looked like the whole world was about to burn.

There was a rustling sound behind them, and they turned to see a dozen reapers walking in pairs along the shaded path by the rock wall heading down to the fence. Each pair held a bundle of rope ends that were connected to huge nets. The nets looked impossibly huge, but they were wrapped around clusters of brightly colored balloons. Thousands of them in each net.

The men in each net crew nodded their respect as they passed. Down below, closer to the fence, the reaper known as Sister Alice was tossing handfuls of sand into the air to watch the direction of its fall.

“It’s time,” said Brother Peter.

But before she could give the signal, a terrible coughing fit struck Sister Sun. She bent over as sharply as if she’d been punched in the stomach, and drops of blood splattered her lap and knees and the dust at her feet. Brother Peter watched helplessly as the fit tore the dying woman apart. Other reapers stood by, their faces mournful. Even though each of them wished only the soothing darkness for Sister Sun, they ached for her to first witness the triumph of her plan.

By slow, torturous degrees the coughs eased in intensity and then slowly, slowly passed.

Sister Sun perched on the edge of her stool like a frail puppet held in place by a single frayed string. The reapers — and the world around them — held their breath, and even the wind slackened for a moment as if unwilling to blow without her permission.

Her right hand trembled in her lap, and it was clear that she could barely lift it. Finally it rose. First barely an inch, then another, and another.

Brother Peter let out a burning ball of air that was searing the walls of his lungs, and in a ringing voice he called, “Sister Sun has given the word. May the darkness bless us all.”

The reapers at the fence made final cuts in work they had already begun with tin snips and bolt cutters. A quarter-mile length of the fence collapsed to the ground. Immediately the net teams rushed onto the airfield, running between the two southernmost of the siren towers. They formed a long line, and other reapers ran up to help them slash the lines that formed the nets. Immediately the captured balloons tumbled out and were shoved away by the wind that blew out of the southeast.

Darkness was closing around Sister Sun’s thoughts, but as the red and yellow and blue and green balloons bobbed and danced across the hot sands, she thought a single word and her lips formed it silently.

“Beautiful.”

Then the darkness wrapped her in its arms and she fell forward.

CHAPTER 66

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Benny. “What kind of monsters did they make here? Or is that a naive question?”

The ranger didn’t answer.

Benny snorted in disgust. “More and more often I get the feeling that growing up after civilization ended is a better deal.”

“More and more often I agree with you, kid.” Joe nodded toward the dead man. “That’s why I resigned today. I reached my limit of shame and guilt for being a part of the old system.”

“Did you know about the Reaper Plague?” asked Nix.

“Nah, that’s not what I mean. Like I told you, I was the guy who tried to stop this sort of thing. I loved my country, and I guess I still do, though I kind of feel the way a kid might feel when they discover that not only are their parents not perfect heroes, but they’re deeply flawed.”

“Was the whole country like that?” asked Benny.

“No — not even close. For the most part it was pretty great. But there never was a country, no matter how noble or well-intentioned, that wasn’t infected by a greedy and power-hungry few. It’s no different from those parasites infecting the zoms. We can’t really blame the afflicted person any more than we can blame the entire country, but we can sure as hell despise those parasites.”

Lilah stood closest to the dead man. “Who was he?”

“According to the paperwork we found, he was the deputy director of this facility in charge of operations. He kept this place running, before, during, and after First Night. He’s been keeping those old secrets all this time This place is way off the grid…. I’ll bet there are all sorts of things here that shouldn’t be anywhere.”

“Well, isn’t that comforting?” said Nix sourly.

They went back to the hallway. The corridor they’d been following ended at a blank wall, but on the far side of the blasted entrance was a much longer hallway that stretched off into shadows. Some residual smoke hung in the air, shifting like ghosts in the breeze. It obscured the hallway like fog in an alley on a humid night.

“I lead,” said Joe, “you follow. Lilah, you watch our backs.”

A month ago — or perhaps a few hours ago — Benny knew that he might resent Lilah being picked out for the more important job; but his mind was running in a different gear now and he knew it. Lilah was the better fighter, and she was far more experienced with being alert and moving with caution. Of course she was the better choice. He also knew that if Riot were here, she would have made a good alternate choice.

There was a certain comfort in accepting these things. It touched on an old lesson Tom had given him, about seeing things as they are without being filtered through anticipation, expectation, or assumption. There was something liberating in seeing things with that clarity.

I’m not who I was, thought Benny as he fell into step behind Nix. This is who I am. I’m not Tom and I’m not little Benny anymore.

I’m me.

Despite everything Benny smiled to himself.

He wanted to tell Nix about this. He knew she would understand, and thinking that made something else click into place in his mind. He and Nix had fought a lot since leaving Mountainside; their relationship had eroded to more of a friendship than romantic love. He thought he understood why. The two people who’d fallen in love were naive and innocent kids back in a secluded town hidden behind a fence. Those kids didn’t exist anymore. For Benny the separation from naive child to aware teen had started the first time Tom took him out into the Ruin and he saw the realities and brutality of the world outside. The real world in no way resembled the version he’d constructed in his head. Even the things like combat and adventure were different beyond the gates. They weren’t fun, they weren’t part of a game. People got hurt and they died and there wasn’t always a happy ending and you couldn’t just clear the pieces off the game board and start again. For Benny, it began with that, but the process of change included fighting for his life, killing to save his life and the lives of others, seeing people die, seeing Tom die, and then leaving the place where Tom was buried and traveling farther out into the Ruin, past all known places and all chance of safety. Out here, where every day was a hardship and every choice was a hard one, something had happened to the old Benny. It wasn’t that he died, but the child in him stepped back and something else emerged. Not an adult — but an older teenager who was in charge of his own life.

A similar process must have been going on in Nix. She wasn’t the funny, happy, easygoing girl Benny had first fallen in love with. Life since then hadn’t given her many reasons to laugh, and happiness was hard to maintain under the brutal sun of a wasteland. And who was easygoing out here in the Ruin? Joe pretended to be, but Benny knew now that the old ranger was playing a role. In truth, he was a heartbroken man who’d spent his entire life trying to save the world while constantly being disappointed in some of the people he should have been able to trust. His banter and jokes were probably the only props that kept him on his feet.

Nix must have felt his thoughts, as she so often did. She turned and looked at him. Benny gave her a small nod and a brief but genuine smile. Nix’s brow furrowed for just a moment, and then he could see the exact moment when she understood that he understood. She was already there.

That was when Benny saw something in Nix’s eyes that he hadn’t seen since before her mother died.

Joy.

Only a spark of it. But proof that her fire hadn’t gone out any more than his had.

It made him want to laugh out loud, to shout, to hug her.

But Nix turned around and followed the ranger and his dog. He followed her through smoke and shadows in a place of mystery and death, but Benny Imura was truly happy and content for the first time in his life.

Yeah, he thought, this is who I am.

CHAPTER 67

They moved through the building. There were storerooms filled with scientific equipment, offices whose only occupants were spiders in dusty old webs, and some rooms in which they found dead bodies. A few had been left to rot, but most were wrapped neatly in plastic. Once they were past the damaged entrance, they found that the electricity was still working. They passed through a generator room where a big unit encased in metal hummed with patient diligence.

They entered a room marked MESS HALL. It was big, with two other doors leading out; one that bore the sign STAFF QUARTERS, and the other that led to the kitchens. The kitchen doors were propped open, but the room beyond was in total darkness. The whole mess hall was lit by only two functioning overhead lights. All the tables had been pushed back to make room for stacks upon stacks of plastic boxes. Five boxes to a stack, five stacks to a row. They stretched from just inside the door almost to the far wall. Beside the containers were waist-high heaps of large clear-plastic bags. Each bag was in turn filled with smaller bags crammed with clear capsules filled with a bright red powder. Benny guessed that there were at least a thousand of these big bags, and countless hundreds of thousands of the capsules.

When Joe Ledger saw those bags, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“That powder,” said Nix in a hushed voice. “Is it the same stuff that was on the fast zoms?”

“I think so,” said the ranger. “Color’s a little different, though. The stuff I took off the zoms was paler.”

Benny reached out to pick up one of the bags, but Joe caught his wrist. “No. Not without gloves.”

“Why? What is this stuff?”

“I think it’s Archangel.”

“Is that a poison?” asked Lilah.

“No… not poison,” said Joe, but before he could finish, Grimm suddenly turned toward the open kitchen doorway at the far side of the room, uttering a low and very menacing growl.

All four of them spun around and brought their weapons up. Joe moved quickly to the front, his right index finger stretched along the outside curve of his pistol’s trigger guard, barrel aimed at the center of the doors.

“What is it?” asked Nix.

But Benny only shook his head. He shuffled sideways to give himself and Nix enough room to swing their swords.

“Look…,” said Lilah in an urgent whisper.

There was a suggestion of movement beyond the doors, inside the darkened kitchen. It was formless and indistinct, like a piece of shadow shifting, and Benny couldn’t even be sure it was anything at all.

There was a sound. A scuff. Soft and passive, like a foot being dragged.

“Get ready,” whispered Joe. “If this goes south on us, I want you to haul your asses back to the chopper.”

Something was emerging from the darkness. It did not look human. It was big and monstrous, with a misshapen head and limbs as thick as tree trunks.

Grimm’s whole body trembled, either with the urge to attack or flee, Benny could not tell. For his own part, Benny wanted to run.

The lumbering creature kept moving forward, and now Benny could see that it had some weird, wrinkled skin. Pale and unnatural.

“Shoot it,” urged Lilah. “Joe… shoot it!”

When Joe didn’t pull the trigger, Lilah raised her spear and tensed to spring, ready for the kill.

“No,” Nix said slowly, “don’t…”

Benny glanced at her. She wore a puzzled expression, and she slowly lowered her sword.

They froze in place, watching in mingled horror and anticipation as the thing shambled toward the open doorway. It paused, still within the bank of shadows inside the kitchen. Joe slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.

Benny felt sweat run down his cheeks.

Then the thing in the shadows stepped into the light.

“Oh my God,” said Nix.

It was not a monster.

It was not a zom.

It was a person, covered head to toe in a wrinkled, many-times-patched, white hazmat suit.

The figure took a trembling step forward and then dragged its leg. Benny could see now that the leg of the suit was stretched around something — a cast or brace.

But what truly caught his eye, what stopped his breath and jolted his mind, was the name stenciled on the front of the hazmat suit. His lips formed the three syllables, though it was Lilah who actually spoke the name aloud.

“McReady.”

She flinched at the sound of Lilah’s voice, or perhaps at her own name. Then she looked at Joe Ledger — at his gun and his murderous armored hound.

“Have you come to kill me?” asked Dr. Monica McReady, her voice muffled by the suit.

The ranger’s mouth hung open.

Dr. McReady nodded as if in answer to her own question. “It’s about time.”

CHAPTER 68

“What’s that?” asked Brother Albert.

His teacup was halfway to his lips when he froze, head raised to listen. Across the table from him, Sister Hannahlily was buttering a piece of bread.

“What’s what?” she said absently.

“There!” said Albert. “Did you hear it?”

“I didn’t hear… ” Hannahlily’s voice trailed off as she suddenly did hear something.

A faint pop. Then a few seconds later, another.

“What is that?”

“It’s coming from outside,” said the nun. She rose and crossed to the doorway. Other monks and nuns were rising too.

Pop!

Pop-pop!

Albert joined her as she stepped out into the lurid redness of the sunset.

Pop!

“I don’t see anything,” he said. But then he did, and in his total surprise he forgot his manners, his vows, and his decorum. “What the hell?”

He stared, goggle-eyed, at a sight that made absolutely no sense. It was weird, impossible. Surreal in a way that teetered on the thin edge between comedy and unpleasantness.

The sky was filled with balloons.

They bounced along the ground, skittering between the legs of the dead, riding puffs of air above them. The Children of Lazarus were drawn to the color and movement. Dead-white hands reached for them. Grabbed them. Jagged fingernails tore through the thin rubber. Broken teeth bit into the glistening toys.

Pop-pop-pop-pop…

CHAPTER 69

Joe shoved his gun into its holster and stepped toward Dr. McReady, but the scientist recoiled from him.

“Monica!” he cried. “Good God, Monica… it’s me — it’s Joe.”

“I know who you are,” she snapped in a voice that sounded rusty from disuse. “Of course it’s you. Who else would they send but their number one killer?”

That stopped Joe in his tracks.

Ouch, thought Benny.

All they could see of McReady was her eyes. They were filled with suspicion and more than a little wild.

Joe held his hands up in a no-threat gesture. “Monica… nobody sent me to hurt you. We’ve been looking for you for months.”

“Eighteen months, one week, six days,” corrected McReady. “And I’ve been here all that time, haven’t I? How hard have you been looking?” The bitterness in her voice was filled with jagged edges.

“We didn’t know where you were,” insisted Joe.

McReady’s laugh was short and harsh. “Oh, I’m quite sure. There was a planeload of people who knew where I was. I hand-wrote the coordinates and put them into Luis Ortega’s hand myself. Are you say he didn’t—”

“Dr. McReady,” said Benny, taking a half step forward, “you don’t understand.”

McReady’s head swiveled toward him. “And who are you? Is Jane Reid recruiting kids now?”

“Dr. McReady,” Benny said calmly, “my name is Benjamin Imura. These girls — Phoenix Riley and Lilah — are my friends. We found your plane.”

Her eyes narrowed with instant suspicion. “What do you mean, ‘found’?”

“It crashed. We found it.”

It took McReady a three-count to respond to that. “W-what?”

“He’s telling the truth, Monica,” said Joe. “It crashed in the desert ten miles short of Sanctuary. Luis Ortega’s dead and so’s the flight crew. These kids found the wreckage and told me. I got your research to Sanctuary, but there was nothing on the plane to indicate where you’d gone. Then Benny and his friends found Sergeant Ortega. He was infected, but they managed to search him and get the coordinates for this place. All that happened today, and we came out here right away.”

“The plane…. crashed?” McReady was clearly having a hard time processing this news. She slumped and sat down heavily on the edge of the destroyed air lock. “It never reached Sanctuary?”

“No.”

“My God…” McReady began absently to undo the Velcro seals of her hazmat suit. Her hands shook visibly. She pulled off the hood to reveal a face that looked considerably thinner and older than the picture Benny had seen in the Teambook. Monica McReady’s chocolate-colored skin had faded to a dusty gray. Her eyes still retained their intelligence, but there was a deep and comprehensive weariness in them, tinged by sadness as she thought about the plane. Her hair was clipped very short and it was a bad job, as if she’d done it herself.

Then she stiffened and demanded, “Did they get it all done? The mass production and distribution? Has the mutation worked its way through the population…?”

Her voice trailed off. She looked from face to face, and when no one answered, McReady began to visibly shake.

“Tell me Jane Reid’s team got this out to the whole damn world!”

Joe knelt in front of McReady. “She couldn’t, Monica. Reid’s people weren’t able to pick up where you left off. They need those last notes.”

She stared blankly at him. “Which last notes?”

“The last stuff. The D-series material. Without that—”

McReady suddenly shoved Joe, knocking him right onto his butt. Grimm barked in alarm. “What are you talking about?” she screamed. “Everything was on that transport. Every scrap of research. All the field notes, our clinical studies, the mutation projections. The complete formula for Archangel. All of it.”

Benny helped Joe to his feet.

“The D-series notes weren’t there,” said Nix. “We thought you took them with you.”

“Why would I take them with me? I sent it all back to Sanctuary so Reid could start production.”

“Production of what?” asked Lilah.

McReady looked puzzled. “Of the cure. What do you think I mean?”

“Wait, wait, hold on,” said Benny. “You’re saying that you cured this thing? Is that what Archangel is?”

“Of course,” snapped McReady. “Why do you think we left Hope One?”

Lilah shook her head. “Joe told us that you wanted to evacuate because the dead were becoming too active.”

“Exactly,” said McReady flatly. “That was the whole point. We developed a metabolic stabilizer first, and then we figured out the cure. Archangel. It was radical, sure, but it worked.”

“But — but—” Lilah looked around in confusion.

“Monica… this isn’t making sense,” said Joe. “We’re talking in circles. We thought that Hope One was being overrun. That’s what Colonel Reid told me. The walkers were getting too frisky, and you wanted to get your team back to Sanctuary.”

Before he even finished, McReady was shaking her head. “We knew exactly how active the walkers were. We’d already rounded up the random ones to send back to Sanctuary, so Jane Reid’s team could study the range of mutations. The rest were our own test subjects. We released them into the wild near Hope One to see if they’d contaminate others with the mutagen. They did. Very, very quickly, too. Once we saw how that worked, I told Jane I wanted to bring my team back to Sanctuary to get the real ball rolling.”

“Wait,” said Benny, “you’re still not making sense. Start at the beginning.”

“Listen, Monica,” insisted Joe, “the D-series records either weren’t on the transport or someone took them off the wreck.”

“They were on the damn plane,” growled McReady.

“Then they’ve been taken. We can’t find them, and the records we could find suggest that you took them with you.”

Benny asked, “Do you think someone messed with them? Left a deliberately false trail?”

“Beginning to look that way, doesn’t it?”

“Why?”

“To be determined.” To McReady he said, “Is there any way to duplicate Archangel without those notes?”

She considered. “Without the D-series notes? No. With those notes, sure. All you need is some basic chemicals, some minerals, a pig, and a walker. Anyone can make Archangel. The only trick is reducing it to a powdered form, but there was a paper on how to do that, too. I prepared that so Reid could transmit it to every lab in the Nation.” She stopped and sagged a bit as the full weight of it hit her. “God, we lost eighteen months. This thing should have been over by now. All the walkers should have been dead by now.”

CHAPTER 70

“Look at all the balloons!” said Eve, and her face was sun-bright with joy.

Riot rose from where she’d been sitting on the sand with the little girl. People were coming out of all the hangars and the dormitory and mess hall to stare at the weird spectacle. Thousands of colored balloons bobbed among the dead, and the crowd of zombies was quickly becoming agitated as they lunged and grabbed and bit at the things.

This was something totally outside of Riot’s experience. It was so absurd, so bizarre, that she found herself smiling.

Had the monks done this?

No, that was ridiculous.

The soldiers at the hangar?

As if in answer to that thought, the sirens abruptly began their banshee wail. The dead paused, and many of them turned toward the sound. A few even lumbered that way, drawn by sound or some rudimentary habit of the limbs and nerves. But the others did not follow.

The sirens were far away. The balloons were right there.

“Stay here,” Riot said to Eve, and she slipped out of the play area and ran to the edge of the trench. Her pulse was already fluttering in her chest.

One by one the dead turned away from the sirens. They grabbed the nearest balloons, growling when they popped. Riot saw a flash of color. Not the bright yellows and blues and greens of the rubber, but a bright red that puffed into the air as each balloon burst. Was it dust?

Or… powder?

It clung to the skin of the zoms. It fell on their eyes and into their open mouths, propelled by the explosion of the balloons.

“What in tarnation?” she said aloud.

Some of the dead stopped where they were, their bodies shuddering and trembling as if they stood on ground troubled by an earthquake. However, the cause of their agitation came from no external force that Riot could see. It had to be something inside them. Something that rippled under the surface of their withered skin.

Then the world was rocked by a series of explosions. Not close — they were to the east, beyond the distant fence. Riot squinted through heat haze as fireballs leaped up from the fields.

There was a rumor among the monks and nuns that the army had laid mines out in those fields. Until now Riot hadn’t believed it.

There was movement out there, and Riot, long practiced at telling the difference between the living and the dead, saw masses of zoms running across the minefield. Running and then flying apart as the mines exploded. More came behind. And more. The mines detonated, and the zoms kept coming, running as if they had a purpose.

Running as if driven.

Behind them, Riot saw a wave of reapers on quads.

As they drew closer, she could see that they wore scarves wrapped around their heads and old-fashioned swimmers’ goggles over their eyes. Each of them had a silver dog whistle clamped between his teeth. They drove a flock of zoms across the minefield, clearing it by exploding it. Opening the way for the mass of reapers who followed.

And here, closer, the balloons bounced along. The dead caught them, bit them, exploded them, and were doused by red powder.

Riot had been trained as a warrior and a leader of warriors. She understood what was happening. She turned and looked at the blank and unresponsive wall of the blockhouse, at the closed doors of the hangar. At the helpless masses of monks and the dying people they tended.

She turned slowly back to watch the oncoming tide of death.

“God,” she breathed.

CHAPTER 71

This thing should have been over by now.

All the walkers should have been dead by now.

Benny actually felt as if Dr. McReady’s words were physical blows that pounded him in the heart and over the head.

“Are you… serious?” asked Nix.

“Of course I’m serious,” barked McReady. “You think I’d joke about something like that?” She nodded to the plastic containers of Archangel. “Why do you think I came here? This base is the best biomaterials production facility west of the Rockies. Ten times better than the setup at Sanctuary, but even a lunkhead like Jane Reid should have managed something.”

Joe sighed. “Without the D-series notes, all she managed to do was make the metabolic stabilizer and a very, very weak version of Archangel. She tried it on a few walkers and got mixed results.”

McReady closed her eyes. “Save me from idiots.”

“Listen, Monica,” said Joe. “How’d you even know about this place? I sure as heck never heard of it.”

McReady snorted. “There are half a dozen bases like this you never heard of. Places nobody ever heard of unless they were on the right lists.”

“I was supposed to be on every list.”

“Oh, cry me a river,” said McReady. “There’s always another level of secrecy, don’t you know that? I know about this place because I wrote the protocols so they could build it. Just like I wrote the protocols for the redesign and repurposing of the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon.”

“Why?”

“Because the United States of America needed to stay safe, and we couldn’t afford to let naive international chemical weapons treaties hamstring us. Every third-rate country who couldn’t afford a nuclear weapons program but got a Junior Chemistry Wizard set for Christmas was cooking up bioweapons and nerve agents. What were we supposed to do? Wait until someone launched something and then complain to Congress that we had no response because our funding was cut and our charters revoked? Grow up, Joe.”

“I guess that worked out really well for you,” observed Nix.

Dr. McReady gave her such a lethal and venomous look that Benny thought Nix would drop right there; but Nix narrowed her green eyes and gave it back full blast.

Before the two could explode into an argument, Benny asked, “Where’s the rest of the staff? We saw some bodies. One guy in his office…?”

“Shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Dick Price. He was the last. No great loss.” The scientist gave another derisive snort. “The rest are dead. Most of them killed themselves. Cowards.”

Benny felt sorry for the scientist, but it was getting harder and harder to like her.

“By the time my team got here,” said McReady without a trace of remorse, “more than two-thirds of the staff were already gone. Before and after we got locked in. The staff who’d been here were torn up by speculation as to whether some of the biological terrors they’d helped to create had been used to destroy the world. Might be true, too. There were suicides… murder-suicide pacts. Heart attacks from stress. A couple just wandered off into the badlands to let the desert or the dead have them.” She shook her head in disgust. “We’re struggling to save the world, to preserve life, and these idiots can’t wait to catch the bus out of here.”

“That guy, Mr. Price, left a message,” said Benny. “He wrote, ‘May God forgive us for what we have done…’ ”

“ ‘We are the horsemen. We deserve to burn,’ ” finished McReady. “All very dramatic.”

“If he killed himself out of guilt,” she said, “what were you all guilty of?”

McReady’s eyes didn’t blink or waver. “If you’re asking me if I participated in the development of the Reaper Plague, then no.”

“I’m sorry—”

McReady pointed down the hall toward Price’s office. “He did. The people here did.”

“They started the plague?” asked Benny, aghast.

“Don’t be an idiot. Why would we release a doomsday plague? We’re scientists. We research, we develop — we don’t implement. Other people — politicians and generals — take science and turn it into a weapon. I expect Captain Ledger here’s been filling your head with his left-of-liberal antimilitary propaganda.”

“First off,” said Joe, “I was a moderate back when elections mattered. Second, I’m in the military. Now, stop evading their questions, Monica. We come here to rescue you and we find a base that I should have been told about, a staff that’s killed themselves in remorse, and suicide messages that talk about guilt. Stop being such a hard-ass and tell us what happened.”

Benny thought that the scientist was going to argue, but instead she seemed to deflate. “Okay, okay… I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been alone too long. Months. Here’s the short version. I took my team to Hope One to investigate reports of mutations among the population of walkers in Washington State. I was very interested in this because mutation was deemed unlikely, since Reaper was designed to be ultra-stable. As you may or may not know, Reaper is a combination of several designer bioweapons, including nine separate viruses, fourteen bacteria, and five genetically altered parasites including the big daddy — the jewel wasp. The core is something called Lucifer 113, which was developed by the Soviets during the Cold War. That one got out of the bag a couple of times and almost lived up to its promise of being an ultimate weapon. It was stopped, though, and all known samples of it were either destroyed or sent to secure facilities like this one. But someone obtained a sample of Lucifer 113, and that sample wound up in the hands of some off-the-radar design lab, which married it to an old terrorist bioweapon called seif al din—wasn’t that one you stopped from being released, Joe?”

“Twice,” he said sadly, and then cursed.

“Our bioweapons teams were given that super-plague and tasked with creating the ultimate version, and then using that as a staring point to create a defensive protocol in case it — or anything like it — ever got out. But somehow the superstrain of it was released, our version. No one knows quite how, and we all have proof that there has never been a more aggressive or deliberately destructive disease.

“Because Reaper is driven by parasites, there’s no such thing as natural immunity, though there is a range of reaction time in terms of symptom onset, necrosis, and other factors. Bottom line: Everyone who’s exposed is infected, and everybody worldwide is exposed. Whoever released this spent years laying the groundwork. They must have introduced eggs and bacteria into water sources all over the world. We started getting wind of it almost two years before the actual outbreak. Labs were reporting the presence of the components in soil throughout the agricultural regions, in water tables and reservoirs, even in processed foods. Best guess is that these components were introduced into the biosphere beginning no later than ten years before the global outbreak. It would have needed at least that much time for the bacteria and parasites to spread. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration — all the power players were involved in researching the spread of the components, but no one really understood what kind of a threat it was.”

She shook her head. “In a strange way you have to admire the scope of that. A coordinated worldwide release of components of a doomsday plague. For that to happen there had to be huge money — hundreds of millions of dollars — and a large number of persons involved. Just the administration of something like that is staggering.”

“Could have been a cult,” suggested Joe as he knelt and removed Grimm’s helmet. The mastiff’s tongue lolled from between rubbery lips. “There were some big cults and pseudo-religions gaining followings around the world. My team ran into a few of them over the years. Some were well funded, highly organized, and extremely militant.”

“I thought about that too,” said McReady. “But really — who cares? The damage is done. They accomplished what they set out to do. They released a doomsday plague, and for most of the population of planet Earth, that’s what it was. Seven billion people died. If some groups hadn’t been able to find defensible positions and learn to work together instead of panicking like mice, we’d be as extinct as the dinosaurs. We’re lucky as many people survived as they did.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we heard about mutations in Washington, and we had to go check it out. The possibility of a mutation was exciting, because it meant that there was a chance of identifying the mutagen taking control of the mutation process.”

“What good would that do?” asked Lilah.

McReady nodded as if she approved of the question. “The pathogen is in a perfect form. You couldn’t make it more deadly than it is. Any change to its nature or structure would actually result in a reduction of its overall threat, because it would mean that it had shifted away from immutability. Follow me?”

“I… think so. If it’s changing, then it isn’t perfect anymore.”

“Smart girl,” said McReady.

Nix said, “We’ve seen some of the mutations. The R3’s. They’re so much faster and scarier.”

“Smarter, too,” said Lilah.

“How’s that a good thing?” asked Benny.

McReady shook her head. “Those are short-term effects. What’s happened is the dormant parasite eggs have been made to hatch. There are active threadworms in the newly infected, but they die off after they’ve laid eggs. As they die off, the process of host decomposition goes into a protracted stasis. We still don’t know how long a walker will last once they’ve reached the stasis point — clearly many years — and we still haven’t cracked all the science on that. Maybe someone will one of these days. Not my concern. When we set up Hope One, we found all sorts of mutations up there. Smarter walkers, faster walkers, with abilities all up and down the Seldon Scale, the evaluation method we developed after the plague started. It was exciting stuff. Dangerous, too… we learned the hard way about how smart and fast these mutations were. Lost a third of our staff in the first few weeks, and we lost more when we started actively looking for the most extreme mutations.”

“That must have been terrifying,” said Nix.

McReady shrugged. “It was worth it. This was real science again. We were doing ten, fifteen autopsies a day, every day. Running tissue samples and other cultures around the clock. What we found was that there was a new bacteria in the mix. This is one of nature’s little jokes, because after we’d looked at every kind of organism or causal agent that might trigger the parasites to hatch, the one we found shouldn’t even have an impact on the jewel wasp, which is the parasite at the heart of the Reaper disease cluster. It is in itself a mutation; in this case it’s a mutated form of the bacteria Brucella suis, a zoonosis that primarily affects pigs. My guess is that the walkers in northern California attacked some wild pigs and wild boars, biting and infecting them but not killing them. The Reaper interacted with the bacteria Brucella suis and caused a mutation there. This probably happened early on, ten, twelve years ago. The rate and form of the mutation is consistent with exposure to radiation, so these walkers may have been survivors of the nukes dropped on San Francisco or even Seattle. In any case, you have radiation causing mutation in the walkers who bit the pigs, and then the presence of the bacteria, which allowed for further mutation….”

Her voice ran down as she looked around.

“Are you following any of this?”

Benny held his thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. “About this much.”

“We met some of those infected pigs,” said Joe. “One of them nearly cut Lilah here in half.”

McReady sighed. “Live ones or dead ones?”

“Dead,” said Joe, “but spry.”

“That’s something we were afraid of. The bacteria Brucella suis allowed the Reaper pathogen to adapt to the pig’s biology. They started turning up about four years ago. We brought two from Hope One, and I radioed ahead to Dick Price to have his people get more of them for when my team arrived. He did, but in the process of bringing the infected boars to Death Valley, he may accidentally have spread the bacterial infection to the walkers in this area. In any case, he managed to get us the boars we needed. We had a pen of about forty of them for a while.”

“You kept them?” gasped Lilah.

“Of course we kept them,” said McReady. “Live boars and reanimated boars were a perfect place to grow the bacteria.”

“What happened to the boars?” asked Benny.

“When we got to the point where we’d devised a way to grow the bacteria synthetically, I ordered the boars terminated. Dick Price sent all ten of his soldiers out there. Not one of them came back.”

“The boars got them?”

“The boars got what was left of them. Reapers laid an ambush. We didn’t even know they were in the area. They trapped our team outside, forced them to give them the access codes to enter this complex. They killed a lot of our people and even let some of the boars loose in here. We had to fight them using brooms and folding chairs and whatever we could grab. The soldiers were all outside being slaughtered. Price’s science team panicked and overreacted. They used grenades and makeshift explosives to fight back, and one of the blasts did something to the air lock so we couldn’t get out. The reapers trashed our communications center. We cut them down, but it was too late. They also pushed our helicopter over the edge of the cliff. That was about a month after we got here. We killed the last of the reapers and slaughtered the pigs they let loose, but so what? We were stuck in here with no communication and no way out of this facility until you blew the door in. Between those who died in the ambush and the rest who killed themselves here, I’ve seen forty-one people die since coming here.”

CHAPTER 72

Benny understood the despair now.

The suicides and hopelessness.

McReady and her people had been trapped in this locked tomb of concrete and steel for almost a year and a half — a place that was so secret even Joe Ledger and his rangers didn’t know about it. The scientists and staff must have thought that they were doomed to die in here, forgotten by a dying world. Until McReady and then the reapers showed up.

Benny said, “Not everyone from the transport plane died in the crash. A few survived, and they joined the Night Church. I… um… killed one of them.” He cleared his throat. “One of them must have had a copy of the coordinates and gave them up when he joined the reapers. That’s probably how they found this place.”

McReady considered, sighed, and nodded. “That might also explain what happened to the missing notes and the samples of mutagen and Archangel I sent to Sanctuary.”

“We recovered some stuff,” said Joe. “Enough for Reid to make some weak versions of the mutagen, but she couldn’t work out how to process the mutagen into the cure. Without your notes Reid said that all they’ll ever hit are dead ends.”

“Damn.” McReady rubbed her eyes. They were paler in color than Benny had expected, less of the intense dark brown of the face in the Teambook photo and more of a dusty burned-gold hue. “The one upside to working in total isolation is that it focuses your concentration.” She nodded at the stacks of containers and heaps of bags. “See those boxes? Eleven tons of a powdered version of the mutagen, boxed to make it easier to transport and store. But you do not want to get any of it in a mucous membrane. Any moisture will activate the bacteria, and that starts the worms hatching.” She laughed. “Those worms are something else. Industrious and clever little buggers. Once they become active in a walker, all the walker’s tissues become softer, more pliant. This is why the R3’s are able to move so much more quickly.”

“What’s in the bags?” asked Nix. “Is that the cure? Is that Archangel?”

“Yes. We have 968,000 capsules as of yesterday’s count. They have enough supplies back at Sanctuary to make a million doses a month.”

“We can save the world,” whispered Nix.

McReady rubbed her eyes. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes, we can.”

They stared at the bags. Benny felt like the floor was tilting under him.

Lilah cut into the silence. “The mutagen doesn’t just make the zoms faster. They got smarter, too.”

Benny nodded. “One of them picked up a stick and hit me with it.”

“Mm,” McReady said diffidently. “The appearance of increased intelligence is nothing magical. From the initial infection, the parasites feed tiny amounts of oxygen to the brain as well as other key proteins and chemicals to the nervous system. That means the brains never die a complete death as they do in ordinary mortality. The parasites have to preserve some of the cranial nerves in order for the host body to walk, grab, eat, chew.”

“But they don’t need to eat,” said Benny. “Everyone knows that.”

“Sure they do. When they don’t or can’t, they go into a deeper stasis. They stop moving, stop expending energy. It’s like a super-amplified version of the hibernation state, similar to that of a ground squirrel. The squirrel’s metabolic rate drops to one percent, but with the walkers it’s down to one thousandth of one percent. They are dead by any standard clinical model, but not in point of fact. The parasites can’t let the host body completely decay, otherwise it’s of no value as a vector for spreading the disease. So the process of necrosis is slowed to an almost negligible level. However, when they do eat, the food they consume is broken down by enzymes at an incredibly slow rate. It might take them months or even years to fully digest whatever protein they’ve consumed. All the while the parasites are being fed.”

“Why don’t people know this?” asked Nix.

“People do,” said McReady. “Everyone in the American Nation knows this. It’s taught in school. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”

“That’s not the kind of thing they teach us at home,” said Nix.

“Pity,” sniffed McReady. “Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge is suicide.”

Benny did not reply to that. He asked, “I’m confused about a few things. Like, why did that man, Mr. Price, write what he wrote?”

“Price spent his life designing bioweapons. Airborne Ebola and a form of tuberculosis used for assassinations, that sort of stuff. He was Dr. Death for thirty years before the Fall. I guess he thought he had a lot to answer for. He probably did have a lot to answer for. Maybe not Reaper, but enough other monsters.”

“Why did you think Joe was here to kill you?”

She almost smiled. “When I saw Joe, I thought that Jane Reid or one of her masters figured I’d gone off the reservation, maybe gone crazy and joined the reapers. Whatever. Generally, if you see Joe Ledger show up pointing a gun at you, I guess you start reexamining your conscience.”

“I’m not an assassin,” said Joe mildly.

“I’m sure that was never on your business card,” was McReady’s cold reply.

“There’s something else,” interrupted Benny. “You said that there were R3’s in Washington and then some around here… but Nix and I saw some fast zoms near where we live, up by Yosemite National Park, in Mariposa County.”

“Drifters,” said McReady. “Probably wild boars spreading the mutation.”

“But what about the boars that attacked Lilah in Nevada, and the R3’s Nix and Lilah fought? Wild boars don’t live in deserts.”

McReady grunted. “I… don’t know.” She looked at Joe. “Could Reid have been—?”

“Reid doesn’t have the D-series notes. I gave her some samples of the mutagen, but she didn’t know what to do with it. And even if she did, she wouldn’t try it on walkers in the wild. She’s not a genius, but she’s not suicidally stupid.”

“Reapers,” said Lilah.

Everyone looked at her. McReady said, “Only if they had the missing notes and a good scientist. A chemist, a molecular biologist, an epidemiologist. Someone who understands the kind of science we’re talking about.”

“Could the reapers have someone like that?” asked Nix. “I mean… they’re religious nuts.”

“They’re religious nuts now,” said Benny. “Who and what were they before they joined the Night Church?”

It was an ugly question, and the answers seemed to scream at them.

“I have a question,” said Nix into the silence. She nodded to the wall of plastic containers. “You made all this. Why? I mean… if you were trapped, if you thought you’d never get out, why did you—?”

McReady’s eyes softened for the first time. “Because there’s always hope, isn’t there?”

“Is there?” asked Lilah, her voice strained. “Hope for whom?”

“For everyone. Even if we died in here, there was always the chance someone would find us and find the stores of Archangel. And — I thought that my notes, my research, was in the hands of Jane Reid’s people at Sanctuary. I thought by now they’d have mass-produced a million tons of it. They should have. Once the parasites are active again, the process of decay kicks in, and the swine bacteria accelerates it. The walkers will become more dangerous, that’s a given, but only for a week or so. Then the decay will have weakened their connective tissues. They’ll start falling apart.”

“The zoms outside looked pretty spry,” said Joe. “I had to gun ’em down.”

“No, that’s the natural mutation from the pigs. They’re faster, but the decomposition is still slow. We figure it will take forty-eight to sixty months for those walkers to fall. Our synthetic version of the natural mutagen — the one we developed before we evacuated Hope One — is different. You get a very fast walker for two or three days, and then you get one that’s slow and awkward, and then you have a pile of meat and bones.”

“What about someone who’s infected but not dead?” asked Lilah. “Would Archangel save them… or kill them?”

“You have to give them Archangel before they’re exposed to the mutagen. At least a full dose. Two capsules. Luckily, it kicks in fast, but without Archangel in their system, the mutagen will only kill them faster.”

“And with Archangel?” demanded Lilah.

“Depends on what you’re asking. If someone takes Archangel and dies, they don’t reanimate.”

“My brother died and he didn’t reanimate,” said Benny.

McReady nodded. “Same thing happened to a few people here. We think that’s a side effect of the mutation. As the new version of the pathogen spreads, some people are developing immunity to the reanimative aspects of the plague. Our computer models indicate that in time — maybe ten or fifteen years — as many as one percent of the population will develop immunity. While that sounds hopeful, it isn’t an answer. You say your brother didn’t reanimate? Then count yourself lucky.”

“No, said Nix, “that’s not how it is. We saw maybe fifty or sixty people killed in that fight, and at least six or seven of them didn’t reanimate. That’s more like ten percent.”

“Then there must be a higher concentration of the Brucella suis bacteria in certain places. Again, count yourselves lucky. In most places the concentration is very low, and the bacteria won’t even grow in certain climates. Just be happy that your brother caught a break.”

“He still died.”

“Everybody dies,” said the scientist.

“What about someone who’s infected but not dead?” asked Lilah again. “Would Archangel save them or kill them?”

McReady straightened. “Why do you ask?”

The grief and fear in Lilah’s face was almost too much for Benny to look at.

Lilah said, “My… I mean, Chong… the… boy I… love is infected.”

“How did it happen?”

“Kid was shot with an arrow dipped in walker flesh,” said Joe.

“How long ago?”

“Little over a month.”

“But — he should be dead.” Then McReady nodded. “He’s at Sanctuary, isn’t he? Joe, you said they have everything except the D-series?”

“Yes.”

“Then they definitely have the metabolic stabilizer.”

“Yes. They used it on him.”

“On Chong,” said Lilah. “His name is Chong. They gave him injections.”

“Is he conscious?” she asked. “Do you know what his vitals are? What’s his core temperature? Has it gone below ninety-six? Does he have a—?”

“We don’t know,” barked Lilah as tears boiled from the corners of her eyes. “He’s sick. He’s lost and he doesn’t know me. My town boy doesn’t know me.”

Nix hurried over to her and put her arm around the Lost Girl’s shoulder.

“Is there any hope for him?” asked Benny. “Any at all?”

Dr. McReady looked at him for a long time before she answered. The only sounds were Grimm’s panting breaths and Lilah’s sobs.

“Yes,” said McReady, “there’s definitely hope.”

Everyone stiffened; every eye was on her.

Dr. McReady undid the fastenings on the sides of the hazmat suit and let it puddle around her feet. She wore a sweat-stained T-shirt and shorts. Her bare arms and legs were as ashy pale as her face. She turned her leg to show a long, jagged scar. It was curved, top and bottom.

It was the distinctive scar of a bite.

“When the reapers let the infected boars in here,” she said slowly, “I was bitten on the calf. Dick Price got the stabilizer into me, and then I dosed myself with Archangel. First human test subject, didn’t have a choice.”

“God…,” breathed Nix.

“Archangel… worked?” whispered Lilah. “You’re cured.”

Dr. Monica McReady smiled. It was a strange smile, made stranger by her unnaturally pale skin.

“I take two pills twice a day, every day, and I probably will for the rest of my life. But… at least I have a life.” She pointed to the bags. “If you can get me to Sanctuary, I can save Mr. Chong.”

CHAPTER 73

They wasted no time.

Benny, Nix, and Lilah loaded metal carts with boxes of the mutagen and bags of the Archangel capsules. They were all very careful, but they worked extremely fast. While they worked, Joe accompanied McReady to help her pack her latest research notes, a computer laptop, and other crucial supplies.

They rolled the carts through the hole blasted in the wall and formed a three-link chain to pass the boxes and bags into the Black Hawk. They were only half-finished when Joe and McReady came running out.

“That’s enough,” yelled Joe. “Get in. We’ll come back for the rest. Let’s go, go, go.”

They didn’t need any urging. Dr. McReady took the copilot seat, and Joe fired up the Black Hawk’s engines. Moments later Zabriskie Point was dwindling behind them. They turned and shot through the darkening skies toward Sanctuary.

Benny and Nix sat on either side of Lilah, each of them holding one of her hands. Her grip was like iron, her face set into a strange, hard smile that was more death mask than anything. The weeks of impenetrable coldness she’d endured had taken a terrible toll on Lilah. During those weeks she’d hardly spoken, barely communicated. Instead of letting Nix and Benny in so they could help her through her pain and grief, she’d closed everything out. Benny knew that she was a practiced hand at eating her pain and pasting on a face of unflappable stoicism, but now a force had come along that was more powerful and dangerous than any enemy Lilah had ever faced. And it was a force over which she had no power.

Hope.

The possibility that Archangel could bring Chong back to her was almost more than Lilah could handle. Tears flowed steadily down her cheeks. They gleamed like hot mercury on her tanned face. Her breathing was ragged and fast, like a sprinter, or like a cornered feral animal whose only option was to destroy everything — even herself.

Hope, Benny knew, was a terrible double-edged thing.

“Lilah,” he said softly, “it’s going to be—”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you,” she said through gritted teeth.

Benny had no doubt at all that she meant it.

He shut up.

But he never let go of her hand.

The Black Hawk slashed through the last pale streamers of sunlight, heading at full speed to the darkness in the east.

Toward Sanctuary.

Toward Chong.

CHAPTER 74

Joe Ledger’s voice boomed at them through the loudspeakers.

“Get up here right now!”

They tore themselves out of their straps and crowded into the cockpit door.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Lilah.

Joe pointed. Deep lines of tension were cut in his skin, and his eyes were filled with horror. The east was a vast black nothing where the land and the sky were indistinguishable from each other. Except at one spot, miles and miles away.

A red-gold glow was painted onto the horizon.

“What is that?” asked Nix.

Joe’s voice was a tight whisper. “That’s Sanctuary.”

They stared at the light. With every moment, with every mile the light grew brighter and brighter. They knew that they were still far away, which meant that a glow like that could never come from a small fire.

“No…,” said Nix in a small and hollow voice.

A single, wrenching, shattered sob broke in Lilah’s chest.

Benny felt as if he was falling through space, as if a hole had opened in the bottom of the helicopter. His heart tore loose from its moorings and sank into the darkness.

There, far away across the gulf of a nightmare landscape, Sanctuary was burning.